If on a winter's night a traveler (21 page)

tained even closer relations with the kidnap bands than I did. For the next kidnapping, the ransom demanded would be all the capital of the insurance company; this would then be divided between the outlaws' organization and their accomplices, the stockholders of the company, all this naturally to the disadvantage of the kidnapped person. As to the identity of this victim, there were no doubts: it was to be me.

The plan to trap me envisaged that between the Honda motorcycles of my escort and the armored car in which I rode, three Yamaha motorcycles would interpose themselves, ridden by three false policemen, who would suddenly slam on their brakes before the curve. According to my counterplan, there would instead be three Suzuki motorcycles which would block my Mercedes five hundred meters before, in a fake kidnapping. When I saw myself blocked by three Kawasaki motorcycles at an intersection before the other two, I realized that my counter-plan had been frustrated by a counter-counterplan whose author I did not know.

As in a kaleidoscope, the hypotheses I would like to record in these lines break up and diverge, just as before my eyes the map of the city became segmented when I dismantled it piece by piece to locate the crossroads where, according to my informers, the trap would be set for me, and to establish the point at which I could get ahead of my enemies so as to upset their plan in my own favor. Everything now seemed assured to me; the magic mirror brought together all the malevolent powers, putting them at my service. I had not taken into consideration a third kidnapping plan arranged by persons unknown. By whom?

To my great surprise, instead of taking me to a secret hideaway, my kidnappers accompany me to my house, lock me in the catoptric room I had reconstructed with such care from the designs of Athanasius Kircher. The

mirror walls reflect on my image an infinite number of times. Had I been kidnapped by myself? Had one of my images cast into the world taken my place and relegated me to the role of reflected image? Had I summoned the Prince of Darkness and was he appearing to me in my own likeness?

On
the
mirror floor a woman's body lies, bound. It is Lorna. If she makes the slightest movement, her naked flesh unfolds, repeated on all the mirrors. I fling myself upon her, to free her from her bonds and gag, to embrace her; but she turns on me, infuriated. "You think you have me in your hands? You're mistaken!" And she digs her nails into my face. Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?

Meanwhile a door has opened. Elfrida comes forward. "I knew of the danger threatening you and I managed to save you," she says. "The method may have been a bit brutal, but I had no choice. But now I can't find the door of this cage of mirrors any more. Tell me, quickly, how can I get out?"

One eye and one eyebrow of Elfrida, one leg in its tight boot, the corner of her mouth with its thin lips and too-white teeth, a beringed hand clutching a revolver are repeated, enlarged by the mirrors, and among these lacerated fragments of her figure intrude patches of Lorna's skin, like landscapes of flesh. Already I can distinguish no longer what belongs to one and what belongs to the other, I am lost, I seem to have lost myself, I cannot see my reflection but only theirs. In a fragment of Novalis, an adept who has managed to reach the secret dwelling of Isis lifts the veil of the goddess.... Now it seems to me that everything that surrounds me is a part of me, that I have managed to become the whole, finally....

[8]

From the diary of Silas Flannery

In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven.

How many years has it been since I could allow myself some disinterested reading? How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself? I turn and see the desk waiting for me, the typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it, the chapter to begin. Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me. What I do has as its aim the spiritual state of this woman in the deck chair framed by the lens of my spyglass, and it is a condition forbidden me.

Every day, before starting work, I look at the woman in the deck chair: I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind

and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable.

At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.

At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.

At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my
true
book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It's no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.

And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my

shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I am unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.

How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes... Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.

Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass
knows
what I should write; or, rather,
she does not know it,
because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she
does not know;
but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.

At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of com-

plementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.

I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it. I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader. Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light.

Looking at the woman in the deck chair, I felt the need to write "from life," that is, to write not her but her reading, to write anything at all, but thinking that it must pass through her reading.

Now, looking at the butterfly that lights on my book, I would like to write "from life," bearing the butterfly in mind. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow "resembles" the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly.

I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.

Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller—the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take him as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Hòlderlin (while it is clear that Hòlderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner's (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn't be ready before Thursday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes

him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and he is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.

On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass. "How enthralled she is! She's holding her breath! How feverishly she turns the pages!" the tormented writer thinks. "Certainly she is reading a novel of great effect, like those of the productive writer!" "How enthralled she is! As if transfigured in meditation, as if she saw a mysterious truth being disclosed!" the productive writer thinks. "Surely she is reading a book rich in hidden meanings, like those of the tormented writer!"

The greatest desire of the tormented writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading. He starts writing a novel as he thinks the productive writer would write it. Meanwhile the greatest desire of the productive writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading; he starts writing a novel as he thinks the tormented writer would write it.

The young woman is approached first by one writer, then by the other. Both tell her they would like her to read the novel they have just finished writing.

The young woman receives the two manuscripts. After a few days she invites the authors to her house, together, to their great surprise. "What kind of joke is this?" She says. "You've given me two copies of the same novel!"