If on a winter's night a traveler (15 page)
"A commando of armed young people has taken over the plane; the reek of perspiration is unpleasant; I soon realize that their chief objective is the capture of my manuscript. These kids belong to the OAP, surely; but the latest bunch of militants are totally unknown to me; grave, hairy faces and a superior attitude are not characteristics that allow me to distinguish which of the movement's two wings they belong to.
"... I won't tell you at length about the puzzled peregrinations of our aircraft, whose route kept bouncing from one control tower to another, inasmuch as no airport
was prepared to receive us. Finally President Butamatari, a dictator with humanistic leanings, allowed the exhausted jet to land on the bumpy runway of his airport, which bordered on the brousse, and he assumed the role of mediator between the extremist commando and the terrified chancelleries of the great powers. For us hostages the days stretch out limp and frayed under a zinc lean-to in the dusty desert. Bluish vultures peck at the ground, pulling out earthworms."
It becomes clear, from the way he addresses them as soon as he is face to face with them, that there is a bond between Marana and the OAP pirates:
"'Go home, babies, and tell your boss next time to send more bright-eyed scouts, if he wants to bring his bibliography up to date.' They look at me with that adenoidal, sleepy expression of agents caught off guard. This sect consecrated to the worship and the unearthing of secret books has ended up in the hands of kids who have only a vague idea of their mission. 'Who are you?' they ask me. The moment they hear my name they stiffen. New to the organization, they couldn't have known me personally, and all they knew about me was the slander circulated after my expulsion: double or triple or quadruple agent, in the service of God knows who and what. Nobody knows that the Organization of Apocryphal Power, which I founded, had a meaning only as long as my control kept it from falling under the sway of unreliable gurus. 'You took us for those Wing of Light characters, didn't you?' they say to me. 'For your information, we are the Wing of Shadow, and we won't fall into your traps!' This was what I wanted to know. I merely shrugged my shoulders and smiled. Wing of Shadow or Wing of Light, for both sides I'm the traitor to be eliminated, but here they can do nothing to me any more, since President Butamatari, who has guaranteed them the right of asylum, has taken me under his protection...."
But why should the OAP hijackers want to get possession of that manuscript? You glance through the papers, seeking an explanation, but you find mostly the bragging of Marana, who gives himself credit for diplomatically arranging the agreement by which Butamatari, having disarmed the commando and got hold of the Flannery manuscript, assures its restitution to the author, asking in exchange that the author commit himself to writing a dynastic novel that will justify the leader's imperial coronation and his aims of annexing the bordering territories.
"I was the one who proposed the formula of the agreement and conducted the negotiations. Once I introduced myself as the representative of the 'Mercury and the Muses' agency, specializing in the advertising and exploitation of literary and philosophical works, the situation took its proper course. Having gained the African dictator's trust, having regained that of the Celtic writer (by purloining his manuscript, I have saved it from the capture plots devised by various secret organizations), I then found it easy to persuade the parties to accept a contract advantageous for both...."
An earlier letter, headed from Liechtenstein, permits a reconstruction of the preliminary relations between Flannery and Marana: "You must not believe the rumors in circulation, according to which this Alpine principality houses only the administrative and fiscal headquarters of the limited company that holds the copyright and signs the contracts of the fertile, best-selling author, whose personal whereabouts are unknown and whose actual existence is in doubt.... I must say that my first encounters, with secretaries who shunted me to attorneys, who shunted me to agents, seemed to confirm your information.... The company that exploits this elderly author's endless verbal production of thrills, crimes, and embraces is structured like an efficient private bank. But the atmo-
sphere reigning there was one of uneasiness and anxiety, as if on the eve of a crash....
"It didn't take me long to discover the reasons: for several months Flannery has been suffering a crisis. He can't write a line; the numerous novels he has begun and for which he has been paid advances by publishers all over the world, involving banks and financing on an international level, these novels in which the brands of liquor to be drunk by the characters, the tourist spots to be visited, the haute-couture creations, furnishings, gadgets, have already been determined by contract through specialized advertising agencies, all remain unfinished, at the mercy of this spiritual crisis, unexplained and unforeseen. A team of ghost writers, experts in imitating the master's style in all its nuances and mannerisms, is ready and waiting to step in and plug the gaps, polish and complete the half-written texts so that no reader could distinguish the parts written by one hand from those by another.... (It seems that their contribution has already played a considerable role in our man's most recent production. ) But now Flannery is telling everybody to wait; he postpones deadlines, announces changes of plan, promises to get back to work as soon as possible, rejects offers of help. According to the more pessimistic rumors, he has started writing a diary, a notebook of reflections, in which nothing ever happens, only moods and the description of the landscape he contemplates for hours from his balcony, through a spyglass...."
In a more euphoric vein the message that, some days later, Marana sends from Switzerland goes: "Make a note of this: where all fail, Ermes Marana succeeds! I have succeeded in speaking with Flannery in person. He was on the terrace of his chalet, watering the potted zinnias. He is a trim, calm old man, pleasant-mannered, as long as he isn't seized by one of his nervous fits.... I could give you a great deal of news about him, valuable for your
publishing activities, and I will do so the moment I receive some token of your interest, via telex to the bank where I have an account whose number I will now give you... ."
The reasons that Marana was impelled to visit the old novelist are not clear from the correspondence: to some extent it seems that he introduced himself as representative of the OEPHLW of New York (Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works), offering him technical assistance to finish his novel ("Flannery turned pale, trembled, clutched the manuscript to his bosom. 'No, not that,' he said, 'I would never allow it'"); and partly he seems to have gone there to defend the interests of a Belgian writer who had been shamelessly plagiarized by Flannery, Bertrand Vandervelde.... But when Marana wrote Cavedagna asking to be put in contact with the writer-recluse, the original idea was apparently to propose, as background for the climactic episodes of his next novel,
In a network of lines that enlace,
an island in the Indian Ocean "that stands out with its ocher-colored beaches against the cobalt deep." The proposition was made in the name of a Milanese real-estate investment firm, with a view toward developing the island, creating a village of bungalows purchasable on the installment plan and by correspondence.
Marana's duties in this firm seem to be connected with "public relations for the development of Developing Countries, with special reference to revolutionary movements, before and after their coming to power, with the aim of procuring and guaranteeing construction permits under the various changes of regime." In this guise, his first mission was carried out in a sultanate of the Persian Gulf where he was to negotiate the subcontract for the construction of a skyscraper. A fortuitous occasion, connected with his work as a translator, had opened to him
doors normally closed to any European.... "The latest wife of the Sultan comes from our country, a woman of sensitive and restless temperament who suffers from the isolation in which she is confined by the geographical position, the local customs, and by court etiquette, though she is sustained by her insatiable passion for reading...." Forced to abandon the novel
Looks down in the gathering shadow
because of a production defect in her copy, the young Sultana wrote to the translator, protesting. Marana rushed to Arabia. "An old woman, veiled and bleary, motioned me to follow her. In a roofed garden, among the bergamots and the lyrebirds and the jets of fountains, she came toward me, cloaked in indigo, a mask on her face, green silk dotted with white gold, a strand of aquamarines on her brow...."
You would like to know more about this Sultana; your eyes nervously scour the pages of thin airmail paper as if you expected to see her appear at any moment.... But it seems that Marana, too, in filling page after page, is moved by the same desire, is pursuing her as she conceals herself.... With each letter the story proves more complicated: writing to Cavedagna from "a sumptuous residence at the edge of the desert," Marana tries to explain his sudden disappearance, telling how the Sultan's emissaries obliged him by force (or persuaded him with an appetizing contract? ) to move down there, to continue his work, exactly as before.... The Sultan's wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding. . . After a serene honeymoon in which the young sovereign received the latest works of the major Western literatures in the original languages, which she reads fluently, the situation became tricky.... The Sultan fears, apparently with reason, a revolutionary plot. His secret service dis-
covered that the conspirators receive coded messages hidden in pages printed in our alphabet. He decreed an embargo, in effect ever since, and ordered the confiscation of all Western books in his lands. Also, the supplying of his consort's personal library has been stopped. An innate mistrust—supported, it seems, by specific evidence—leads the Sultan to suspect his wife of conniving with the revolutionaries. But failure to fulfill the famous clause in the marriage contract would bring about a rupture very onerous for the reigning dynasty, as the lady did not hesitate to threaten in the storm of wrath that overwhelmed her when the guards tore from her hands a novel she had barely begun—the one by Bertrand Vandervelde, to be precise.
It was then that the secret service of the sultanate, learning that Ermes Marana was translating that novel into the lady's native language, persuaded him, with convincing arguments of diverse nature, to move to Arabia. The Sultana receives regularly each evening the stipulated quantity of fictional prose, no longer in the original editions, but in typescript fresh from the translator's hands. If a coded message were hidden in the succession of words or letters of the original, it would now be irretrievable....
"The Sultan sent for me to ask me how many pages I still have to translate in order to finish the book. I realized that in his suspicions of political-conjugal infidelity, the moment he most fears is the drop in tension that will follow the end of the novel, when, before beginning another, his wife will again be attacked by impatience with her condition. He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to fight the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up.... I have my own reasons for fearing that moment, which could mean the loss of my privileges at court...."
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on....
Many feelings distress you as you leaf through these letters. The book whose continuation you were already enjoying in anticipation, vicariously through a third party, breaks off again.... Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading.... In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended... just as the revolt remains suspended, while the conspirators wait in vain to begin it with their illustrious accomplice, and time weighs motionless on the flat shores of Arabia.... Are you reading or daydreaming? Do the effusions of a graphomane have such power over you? Are you also dreaming of the petroliferous Sultana? Do you envy the lot of the man decanting novels in the seraglios of Arabia? Would you like to be in his place, to establish that exclusive bond, that communion of inner rhythm, that is achieved through a book's being read at the same time by two people, as you thought possible with Ludmilla? You cannot help giving the faceless lady reader evoked by Marana the features of the Other Reader whom you know; you already see Ludmilla among the mosquito nets, lying on her side, the wave of her hair flowing on the page, in the enervating season of the monsoons, while the palace conspiracy sharpens its blades in silence, and she abandons herself to the flow of reading as if to the sole possible action of life
in a world where only arid sand remains over strata of oily bitumen and the risk of death for reasons of state and the division of sources of energy....
You look through the correspondence again seeking more recent news of the Sultana.... You see other female figures appear and disappear:
in the island in the Indian Ocean, a woman on a beach "dressed in a pair of big dark glasses and a smearing of walnut oil, placing between her person and the beams of the dog days' sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine." The issue she is reading publishes in advance the beginning of the new thriller by Silas Flannery. Marana explains to her that magazine publication of the first chapter is the sign that the Irish writer is ready to conclude contracts with firms interested in having brands of whisky appear in the novel, or of champagne, automobile models, tourist spots. "It seems his imagination is stimulated, the more advertising commissions he receives." The woman is disappointed: she is a devoted reader of Silas Flannery. "The novels I prefer," she says, "are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page...."