If on a winter's night a traveler (13 page)

You could tell him it didn't matter, this isn't the novel you were looking for, but partly because you rather like its opening, and partly because Mr. Cavedagna, more and more worried, has been swept away by the whirlwind of his publishing activities, there is nothing for you to do but start reading
Looks down in the gathering shadow.

Looks down in the gathering shadow

It was all very well for me to pull up the mouth of the plastic bag: it barely reached Jojo's neck, and his head stuck out. Another way would be to put him into the sack head first, but that still didn't solve the problem, because then his feet emerged. The solution would have been to make him bend his knees, but much as I tried to help him with some kicks, his legs, which had become stiff, resisted, and in the end when I did succeed, legs and sack bent together: he was still harder to move and the head stuck out worse than before.

"When will I manage really to get rid of you, Jojo?" I said to him, and every time I turned him around I found that silly face of his in front of me, the heart-throb mustache, the hair soldered with brilliantine, the knot of his tie sticking out of the sack as if from a sweater, I mean a sweater dating from the years when he still followed the fashion. Maybe Jojo had arrived at the fashion of those years a bit late, when it was no longer the fashion anywhere, but having envied as a young man those characters dressed like that, with their hair like that, from their

brilliantine to their black patent-leather shoes with velvet saddles, he had identified that look with good fortune, and once he had made it he was too taken up with his own success to look around and notice that the men he wanted to resemble had a completely different appearance.

The brilliantine held well; even when I pressed his skull, to push him down into the sack, his crown of hair remained spherical and split only into compact strips that stood up in an arc. The knot of his tie had gone a bit crooked; instinctively I started to straighten it, as if a corpse with a crooked tie might attract more attention than a corpse that was neat.

"You need another sack to stick over his head," Bernadette said, and once again I had to admit that girl's intelligence was superior to what you would expect from one of her background.

The trouble was that we couldn't manage to find another large-size plastic bag. There was only one, for a kitchen garbage can, a small orange sack that could serve very well to conceal his head, but not to conceal the fact that this was a human body contained in one sack, with the head contained in a smaller one.

But the way things were, we couldn't stay in that basement any longer, we had to get rid of Jojo before daylight, we had already been carrying him around for a couple of hours as if he were alive, a third passenger in my convertible, and we had already attracted the attention of too many people. For instance, those two cops on their bicycles who came over quietly and stopped to look at us as we were about to tip him into the river (the Pont de Bercy had seemed deserted a moment before), and immediately Bernadette and I start slapping him on the back, Jojo slumped there, his head and hands swaying over the rail, and I cry, "Go ahead, vomit it all up,
mon vieux,
it'll clear your head!" And, both of us supporting him, his arms around our necks, we carry him to the car.

At that moment the gas that accumulates in the belly of corpses is expelled noisily; the two cops burst out laughing. I thought that Jojo dead had quite a different character from the living Jojo, with his finicky manners; and, alive, he wouldn't have been so generous, coming to the aid of two friends who were risking the guillotine for his murder.

Then we started looking for the plastic bag and the can of gas, and now all we had to find was the place. It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse. "Isn't there a forest at Fontainebleau?" I say, starting the motor, to Bernadette, who has sat down beside me again. "Tell me the way; you know the road." And I thought that perhaps when the sun had tinged the sky gray we would be coming back into the city in the line of trucks carrying vegetables, and in a clearing among the hornbeams nothing would be left of Jojo but a charred and fetid residue, and my past as well. And as well, I say, this might be the time when I can convince myself that all my pasts are burned and forgotten, as if they had never existed.

How many times had I realized that my past was beginning to weigh on me, that there were too many people who thought I was in their debt, materially and morally— for example, at Macao, the parents of the girls of the "Jade Garden" (I mention them because there's nothing worse than Chinese relations when it comes to not being able to get rid of them) and yet when I hired the girls I made a straightforward deal, with them and their families, and I paid cash, so as not to see them constantly turning up there, the skinny mothers and fathers in white socks, with a bamboo basket smelling of fish, with that lost expression as if they had come from the country, whereas they all lived in the port quarter. As I was saying, how many times, when the past weighed too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break: to

change jobs, wife, city, continent—one continent after the other, until I had made the whole circle—habits, friends, business, customers. It was a mistake, but when I realized that, it was too late.

Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I'll turn the mileage back to zero, I'll erase the blackboard. The morning after the day I arrived in a new country, this zero had already become a number with so many ciphers that the meter was too small, it filled the blackboard from one side to the other, people, places, likes, dislikes, missteps. Like that night when we were looking for the right place to burn up Jojo, our headlights searching among the tree trunks and the rocks, and Bernadette pointing to the dashboard: "Look. Don't tell me we're out of gas." She was right. With all the things on my mind, I had forgotten to fill the tank, and now we risked ending up miles from nowhere with a broken-down car, at a time when all the service stations were closed. Fortunately, we hadn't set fire to Jojo yet: if we had come to a halt only a short distance from the pyre, we couldn't have run off on foot, leaving behind a car that could be identified as mine. In other words, all we could do was pour into our tank the can of gas meant to soak Jojo's blue suit, his mono-grammed silk shirt, and then beat it back to the city as fast as possible, trying to dream up another plan for getting rid of him.

It was all very well for me to say that every time I had landed in a jam I had always extricated myself, from every lucky situation as well as from every disaster. The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry

curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish, or in the slop jars of prisons or the bedpans of hospitals or the latrines of camps, or simply in the bushes, taking a good look first to make sure no snake will pop out, like that time in Venezuela. You can't change your past any more than you can change your name; in spite of all the passports I've had, with names I can't even remember, everybody has always called me Ruedi the Swiss. Wherever I went and however I introduced myself, there has always been somebody who knew who I was and what I had done, even though my appearance has changed a lot with the passing years, especially since my head has become hairless and yellow as a grapefruit, which happened during the typhoid epidemic aboard the
Stjarna,
because, considering the cargo we were carrying, we couldn't approach shore or even radio for help.

Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can't distinguish the fibers of the weave. And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day, the visit of a Singhalese who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub, I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life, which continues even in this place from which I have decided I must not move any more, this little house with a courtyard garden in the Parisian
banlieu
where I have set up my tropical-fish aquarium, a quiet business, which forces me more than any other would to lead a stable life, because you can't neglect the fish, not even for one day, and as for women, at my age you have earned the right not to feel like getting involved in new troubles.

Bernadette is a different story. With her I could say I had proceeded without a single error: as soon as I had learned Jojo was back in Paris and was on my trail, I didn't delay a moment before setting out on his trail, and so I discovered Bernadette, and I was able to get her on my side, and we worked out the job together, without his suspecting a thing. At the right moment I drew the curtain aside and the first thing I saw of him—after all the years in which we had lost sight of each other—was the piston movement of his big hairy behind between her white knees; then the neatly combed hair on the back of his head on the pillow, beside her face, a bit wan, moving ninety degrees to leave me free to strike. Everything happened in the quickest and cleanest way, giving him no time to turn and recognize me, to know who had arrived to spoil his party, maybe not even to become aware of crossing the border between the hell of the living and the hell of the dead.

It was better like that, for me to look him in the face only as a dead man. "The game's over, you old bastard," I couldn't help saying to him, in an almost affectionate voice, while Bernadette was dressing him neatly, including the patent-leather-and-velvet shoes, because we had to carry him outside pretending he was so drunk he couldn't stand on his own feet. And I happened to think of our first meeting all those years ago in Chicago, in the back of old Mrs. Mikonikos's shop, full of busts of Socrates, when I realized that I had invested the insurance money from the faked fire in his rusty slot machines and that he and the old paralytic nymphomaniac had me in their power. The day before, looking from the dunes at the frozen lake, I had tasted such freedom as I had never felt for years, and in the course of twenty-four hours the space around me had closed again, and everything was being decided in a block of stinking houses between the Greek neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. My

life had known turning points of this sort by the dozen, in one direction or the other, but after that I never stopped trying to get even with him, and since then the list of my losses had only grown longer. Even now that the smell of corpse began to rise through his cheap cologne, I realized that the game with him wasn't yet over, that Jojo dead could ruin me yet again as he had ruined me so often when alive.

I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn't allow light to pass: a material, in other words, much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let's say it's a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative possibilities at my disposal.

Which, if you look closer, is the sign of real wealth, solid and vast, in the sense that if, we'll assume, I had only one story to tell, I would make a huge fuss over this story and would end up botching it in my rage to show it in its

true light, but, actually having in reserve a virtually unlimited supply of narratable material, I am in a position to handle it with detachment and without haste, even allowing a certain irritation to be perceptible and granting myself the luxury of expatiating on secondary episodes and insignificant details.

Every time the little gate creaks—I'm in the shed with the tanks at the end of the garden—I wonder from which of my pasts the person is arriving, seeking me out even here: maybe it is only the past of yesterday and of this same suburb, the squat Arab garbage collector who in October begins his rounds for tips, house by house, with a Happy New Year card, because he says that his colleagues keep all the December tips for themselves and he never gets a penny; but it could also be the more distant pasts pursuing old Ruedi, finding the little gate in the Impasse: smugglers from Valais, mercenaries from Katanga, croupiers from the Varadero casino and the days of Fulgencio Batista.

Bernadette had no part in any of my pasts; she knew nothing of the old business between Jojo and me that had forced me to eliminate him like that, maybe she believed I had done it for her, for what she had told me of the life he has forced her into. And for the money, naturally, which was no pittance, even if I couldn't yet say that I felt it in my pocket. It was our common interest that kept us together: Bernadette is a girl who catches on right away; in that mess, either we managed to get out of it together or we were both done for. But certainly Bernadette had something else in the back of her mind: a girl like her, if she's going to get by, has to be able to count on somebody who knows his way around; if she had got me to rid her of Jojo, it was in order to put me in his place. There had been all too many stories of this sort in my past, and they had all been total losses for me; this was why I had retired from business and didn't want to go back into it.