If on a winter's night a traveler (18 page)

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.