If on a winter's night a traveler (17 page)
Every morning before my classes begin I do an hour of jogging; that is, I put on my Olympic sweatsuit and I go out to run, because I feel the need to move, because the doctors have ordered it to combat the excess weight that oppresses me, and also to relieve my nerves a little. During the day in this place, if you do not go to the campus, to the library, to audit colleagues' courses, or to the university coffee shop, you do not know where to go; therefore the only thing is to start running this way or that on the hill, among the maples and the willows, as many students do and also many of my colleagues. We cross on the rustling paths of leaves and sometimes we say "Hi!" to
each other, sometimes nothing, because we have to save our breath. This, too, is an advantage running has over other sports: everybody is on his own and is not required to answer to others.
The hill is entirely built up, and as I run I pass two-story wooden houses with yards, all different and all similar, and every so often I hear a telephone ring. This makes me nervous; instinctively I slow down; I prick up my ears to hear whether somebody is answering and I become impatient when the ringing continues. Continuing my run, I pass another house in which a telephone is ringing, and I think: There is a telephone chasing me, there is somebody looking up all the numbers on Chestnut Lane in the directory, and he is calling one house after the other to see if he can overtake me.
Sometimes the houses are all silent and deserted, squirrels run up the tree trunks, magpies swoop down to peck at the feed set out for them in wooden bowls. As I run, I feel a vague sensation of alarm, and even before I can pick up the sound with my ear, my mind records the possibility of the ring, almost summons it up, sucks it from its own absence, and at that moment from a house comes, first muffled then gradually more distinct, the trill of the bell, whose vibrations perhaps for some time had already been caught by an antenna inside me before my hearing perceived them, and there I go rushing in an absurd frenzy, I am the prisoner of a circle in whose center is the telephone ringing inside that house, I run without moving away, I hover without shortening my stride.
"If nobody has answered by now, it means nobody is home.... But why do they keep calling, then? What are they hoping? Does a deaf man perhaps live there, and do they hope that by insisting they will make themselves heard? Perhaps a paralytic lives there, and you have to allow a great deal of time so that he can crawl to the phone.... Perhaps a suicide lives there, and as long as
you keep calling him, some hope remains of preventing his extreme act...." I think perhaps I should try to make myself useful, lend a hand, help the deaf man, the paralytic, the suicide.... And at the same time I think—in the absurd logic at work inside me—that in doing so, I could make sure the call is not by chance for me....
Still running, I push open the gate, enter the yard, circle the house, explore the ground behind it, dash behind the garage, to the tool shed, the doghouse. Everything seems deserted, empty. Through an open window in the rear a room can be seen, in disorder, the telephone on the table continuing to ring. The shutter slams; the window frame is caught in the tattered curtain.
I have circled the house three times; I continue to perform the movements of jogging, raising elbows and heels, breathing with the rhythm of my run so that it is clear my intrusion is not that of a thief; if they caught me at this moment I would have a hard time explaining that I came in because I heard the telephone ring. A dog barks; not here—it is the dog of another house that cannot be seen— but for a moment the signal "barking dog" is stronger in me than the "ringing telephone," and this is enough to open a passage in the circle that was holding me prisoner there; now I resume running among the trees along the street, leaving behind me the increasingly muffled ringing.
I run until there are no more houses. In a field I stop to catch my breath. I do some knee bends, some push-ups, I massage the muscles of my legs so they will not get cold. I look at the time. I am late, I must go back if I do not want to keep my students waiting. All I need is for the rumor to spread that I go running through the woods when I should be teaching.... I fling myself onto the return road, paying no attention to anything; I will not even recognize that house, I will pass it without noticing. For that matter, the house is exactly like the others in every respect, and the only way it could stand out would be if the telephone were to ring again, which is impossible....
The more I turn these thoughts over in my head, as I run downhill, the more I seem to hear that ring again; it grows more and more clear and distinct, there, I am again in sight of the house and the telephone is still ringing. I enter the garden, I go around behind the house, I run to the window. I have only to reach out to pick up the receiver. Breathless, I say, "He's not here...." and from the receiver a voice—a bit vexed, but only a bit, for what is most striking about this voice is its coldness, its calm— says: "Now, you listen to me. Marjorie is here, she'll be waking in a little while, but she's tied up and can't get away. Write down this address carefully: one-fifteen Hillside Drive. If you come to get her, OK; otherwise, there's a can of kerosene in the basement and a charge of plastic attached to a timer. In half an hour this house will go up in flames...."
"But I'm not—" I begin to answer.
They have already hung up.
Now what do I do? Of course I could call the police, the fire department, on this same telephone, but how can I explain, how can I justify the fact that I, in other words how can I who have nothing to do with it have anything to do with it? I start running again, I circle the house once more, then I resume my way.
I am sorry for this Marjorie, but if she has got herself into such a jam she must be mixed up in God knows what things, and if I stepped forward to save her, nobody would believe that I do not know her, there would be a great scandal, I am a professor at another university invited here as visiting professor, the prestige of both universities would suffer....
To be sure, when a life is in the balance these considerations should take a back seat.... I slow down. I could enter any one of these houses, ask them if they will let me call the police, say first of all quite clearly that I do not know this Marjorie, I do not know any Marjorie....
To tell the truth, here at the university there is a student named Marjorie, Marjorie Stubbs: I noticed her immediately among the girls attending my classes. She is a girl who you might say appealed to me a lot, too bad that the time I invited her to my house to lend her some books an embarrassing situation may have been created. It was a mistake to invite her: this was during my first days of teaching, they did not yet know the sort I am here, she could misunderstand my intentions, that misunderstanding in fact took place, an unpleasant misunderstanding, even now very hard to clarify because she has that ironic way of looking at me, and I am unable to address a word to her without stammering, the other girls also look at me with an ironic smile....
Yes, I would not want this uneasiness now reawakened in me by the name Marjorie to keep me from intervening to help another Marjorie, whose life is in danger.... Unless it is the same Marjorie... Unless that telephone call was aimed personally at me ... A very powerful band of gangsters is keeping an eye on me, they know that every morning I go jogging along that road, maybe they have a lookout on the hill with a telescope to follow my steps, when I approach that deserted house they call on the telephone, it is me they are calling, because they know the unfortunate impression I made on Marjorie that day at my house and they are blackmailing me....
Almost without realizing it, I find myself at the entrance to the campus, still running, in jogging garb and running shoes, I did not stop by my house to change and pick up my books, now what do I do? I continue running across the campus, I meet some girls drifting over the lawn in little groups, they are my students already on their way to my class, they look at me with that ironic smile I cannot bear.
Still making running movements, I stop Lorna Clifford and I ask her, "Is Stubbs here?"
The Clifford girl blinks. "Marjorie? She hasn't shown up for two days... Why?"
I have already run off. I leave the campus. I take Grosvenor Avenue, then Cedar Street, then Maple Road. I am completely out of breath, I am running only because I cannot feel the ground beneath my feet, or my lungs in my chest. Here is Hillside Drive. Eleven, fifteen, twenty-seven, fifty-one; thank God the numbers go fast, skipping from one decade to the next. Here is 115. The door is open, I climb the stairs, I enter a room in semidarkness. There is Marjorie, tied on a sofa, gagged. I release her. She vomits. She looks at me with contempt.
"You're a bastard," she says to me.
[7]
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,