If on a winter's night a traveler (16 page)
from the terrace of the Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley. "She's there every day," the writer says. "Every time I'm about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she's reading? I know it isn't a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey." Marana asks
him if this is why he is no longer able to work. "Oh, no, I write," he answered; "it's now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully." "Too faithfully," Marana interrupts him, icily. "As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that woman is reading,
Looks down in the gathering shadow,
I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!" Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: "Then, according to you, that reader ... the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can't bear it...."
in the African airport, among the hostages of the hijacking who are waiting sprawled on the ground, fanning themselves or huddled into the blankets distributed by the hostesses at nightfall, when the temperature dropped suddenly, Marana admires the imperturbability of a young woman who is crouching off to one side, her arms grasping her knees, raised beneath her long skirt to act as lectern; her hair, falling on the book, hiding her face; her hand limply turning the pages as if all that mattered were decided there, in the next chapter. "In the degradation that prolonged and promiscuous captivity imposes on the appearance and the behavior of all of us, this woman seems to me protected, isolated, enveloped as if in a distant moon...." It is then that Marana thinks: I must convince the OAP pirates that the book that made setting up their whole risky operation worthwhile is not the one they have confiscated from me, but this one that she is reading....
in New York, in the control room, the reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists, with pressure manometers and a stethoscopic belt, her temples beneath their crown of hair
held fast by the serpentine wires of the encephalogram that mark the intensity of her concentration and the frequency of stimuli. "All our work depends on the sensitivity of the subject at our disposal for the control tests: and it must, moreover, be a person of strong eyesight and nerves, to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts." The man in the white smock rips off one encephalogram after another, as if they were pages from a calendar. "Worse and worse," he says. "Not one novel being produced holds up. Either the programming has to be revised or the reader is not functioning." I look at the slim face between the blinders and the visor, impassive also because of the earplugs and the chin strap that keeps the jaw from moving. What will her fate be?
You find no answer to this question that Marana lets fall almost with indifference. Holding your breath, you have followed from letter to letter the transformations of the woman reader, as if it were always the same person. But even if they were many persons, to all of them you attribute the appearance of Ludmilla.... Isn't it like her to insist that now one can ask of the novel only to stir a depth of buried anguish, as the final condition of truth which will save it from being an assembly-line product, a destiny it can no longer escape? The image of her naked under the equatorial sun already seems more credible to you than that of her behind the Sultana's veil, but it could still be a single Mata Hari who moves, pensively, through extra-European revolutions to open the way for the bulldozers of a cement firm.... Dispel this image, and receive
that of the deck chair as it comes toward you through the limpid Alpine air. Here you are ready to drop everything: leave, track down Flannery's hideaway, simply to watch with a spyglass the woman reading or to seek her traces in the diary of the blocked writer.... (Or is what tempts you the idea of being able to resume your own reading of
Looks down in the gathering shadow,
even under another title and signed by another name?) But now Marana transmits more and more distressing news: there she is hostage of hijackers, then prisoner in a Manhattan slum. How did she end up over there, chained to an instrument of torture? Why is she being forced to undergo as a torment what is her natural condition, reading? And what hidden plan makes the paths of these characters cross constantly: she, Marana, the mysterious sect that steals manuscripts?
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.
"I thought I was alone in the elevator," Marana writes, again from New York. "Instead a form rises at my side: a youth with hair of arboreal extent had been crouched in a corner, wrapped in clothes of rough canvas. This is not a proper elevator so much as a freight elevator, a cage closed by a folding gate. At every floor a perspective of deserted rooms appears, faded walls with the mark of vanished furniture and uprooted pipes, a desert of moldy
floors and ceilings. Using his red hands with their long wrists, the young man stops the elevator between two floors.
"'Give me the manuscript. We're the ones you have brought it to, not the others. Even if you were thinking the opposite. This is a
true
book, even if its author has written so many false ones. So it comes to us.'
"With a judo movement he knocks me to the floor and seizes the manuscript. I realize at this moment that the young fanatic is convinced he is holding the diary of Silas Flannery's spiritual crisis and not the outline of one of his usual thrillers. It's amazing how prompt these secret sects are to pick up any piece of news, whether true or false, that coincides with their expectations. Flannery's crisis had aroused the two rival factions of Apocryphal Power and, with opposing hopes, they had unleashed their informers in the valleys around the novelist's chalet. The Wing of Shadow people, knowing that the great fabricator of assembly-line novels was no longer able to believe in his tricks, had convinced themselves that his next novel would mark the switch from cheap and relative bad faith to essential and absolute bad faith, the masterpiece of falsity as knowledge, and would therefore be the book they had been seeking for such a long time. The Wing of Light followers, on the other hand, thought that from the crisis of such a professional in falsehood only a cataclysm of truth could be born, and this is what they believed the writer's diary of which there was so much talk would be.... At the rumor, circulated by Flannery, that I had stolen an important manuscript from him, each side identified the manuscript with the object of its search, and both set out to find me, the Wing of Shadow causing the hijacking of the plane, the Wing of Light that of the elevator....
'The arboreal young man, having hidden the manuscript in his jacket, slipped out of the elevator, slammed
the gate in my face, and is now pressing the button to make me disappear downward, after hurling a final threat at me: 'The score with you isn't settled, Agent of Mystification! We still have to liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the Counterfeiters!' I laugh as I slowly sink. There is no machine, kiddo. It's the Father of Stories who dictates our books!'
"He brings the elevator back up. 'Did you say the Father of Stories?' He has turned pale. For years the followers of the sect have been searching for the old blind man, across all the continents, where his legend is handed down in countless local variants.
'"Yes, go tell that to the Archangel of Light! Tell him I've found the Father of Stories! I have him in my hands, and he's working for me! Electronic machine, my foot!' And now I'm the one who presses the down button."
At this point three simultaneous desires are competing in your soul. You would be ready to leave immediately, cross the ocean, explore the continent beneath the Southern Cross until you can find the latest hiding place of Ermes Marana and wrest the truth from him, or at least get from him the continuations of the interrupted novels. At the same time you want to ask Cavedagna if he can immediately let you read
In a network of lines that enlace
by the pseudo (or genuine?) Flannery, which might also be the same thing as
Looks down in the gathering shadow
by the genuine (or pseudo?) Vandervelde. And you can't wait to run to the café where you are to meet Ludmilla, to tell her the confused results of your investigation and to convince yourself, by seeing her, that there can be nothing in common between her and the women readers encountered around the world by the mythomane translator.
The last two desires are easily satisfied, and are not mutually exclusive. In the café, waiting for Ludmilla, you begin to read the book sent by Marana.
In a network of lines that enlace
The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say "should" because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort. Nor do I believe that instead of an attempted description of this state of the spirit, a metaphor would serve better— for example, the piercing sting of an arrow that penetrates a hip's naked flesh. This is not because one cannot employ an imaginary sensation to portray a known sensation— though nobody these days knows the feeling of being struck by an arrow, we all believe we can easily imagine it, the sense of being helpless, without protection in the presence of something that reaches us from alien and unknown spaces, and this also applies very well to the ring of the telephone—but, rather, because the arrow's per-
emptory inexorability, without modulations, excludes all the intentions, implications, hesitations possible in the voice of someone I do not see, though even before he says anything I can already predict, if not what he will say, at least what my reaction to what he is about to say will be. Ideally, the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because all around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that apparently cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is occupied by the ring, and my presence is no longer what it was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately, but as a diffusion through space and time of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will.
Perhaps the mistake lies in establishing that at the beginning I and a telephone are in a finite space such as my house would be, whereas what I must communicate is my situation with regard to numerous telephones that ring; these telephones are perhaps not calling me, have no relation to me, but the mere fact that I can be called to a telephone suffices to make it possible or at least conceivable that I may be called by all telephones. For example, when the telephone rings in a house near mine, for a moment I wonder if it is ringing in my house—a suspicion that immediately proves unfounded but which still leaves a wake, since it is possible that the call might really be for me and through a wrong number or crossed wires it has gone to my neighbor, and this is all the more possible since in that house there is nobody to answer and the telephone keeps ringing, and then in the irrational logic that ringing never fails to provoke in me, I think: Perhaps it is indeed for me, perhaps my neighbor is at home but
does not answer because he knows, perhaps also the person calling knows he is calling a wrong number but does so deliberately to keep me in this state, knowing I cannot answer but know that I should answer.
Or else the anxiety when I have just left the house and I hear a telephone ringing that could be in my house or in another apartment and I rush back, I arrive breathless, having run up the stairs, and
the
telephone falls silent and I will never know if the call was for me.
Or else also when I am out in the streets, and I hear telephones ring in strange houses; even when I am in strange cities, in cities where my presence is unknown to anyone, even then, hearing a ring, my first thought every time for a fraction of a second is that the telephone is calling me, and in the following fraction of a second there is the relief of knowing myself excluded for the moment from every call, unattainable, safe, but this relief also lasts a mere fraction of a second, because immediately afterward I think that it is not only that strange telephone that is ringing; many kilometers away, hundreds, thousands of kilometers, there is also the telephone in my house, which certainly at that same moment is ringing repeatedly in the deserted rooms, and again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.