If on a winter's night a traveler (7 page)

"In what?" you inquire, thinking of Ludmilla, who came here, who hid here, perhaps with Irnerio, with others.

"In everything... Perhaps there is something that attracts them, this uncertainty between life and death, perhaps this is what they feel, without understanding. They come here to do what they do, but they don't sign up for

the course, they don't attend classes, nobody ever takes an interest in the literature of the Cimmerians, buried in the books on these shelves as if in the graves of a cemetery...."

"I was, in fact, interested in it.... I had come to ask if there exists a Cimmerian novel that begins... No, the best way is to tell you right off the names of the characters: Gritzvi and Zwida, Ponko and Brigd. The action begins at Kudgiwa, but perhaps this is only the name of a farm; then I believe it shifts to Pëtkwo, oh the Aagd...."

"Oh, that can be found quickly!" the professor exclaims, and in one second he is freed from his hypochondriacal fog and glows like an electric bulb. "It is unquestionably
Leaning from the steep slope,
the only novel left us by one of the most promising Cimmerian poets of the first quarter of our century, Ukko Ahti.... Here it is!" And with the leap of a fish swimming against rapids he aims at a precise spot on a shelf, grasps a slim volume bound in green, slaps it to dispel the dust. "It has never been translated into any other language. The difficulties, to be sure, are enough to discourage anyone. Listen: 'I am addressing the conviction...' No: 'I am convincing myself to transmit...' You will note that both verbs are in the present progressive."

One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun. Only some proper names are identical, a detail that is surely very odd, but which you do not stop to ponder, because gradually, from Uzzi-Tuzii's laborious extempore translation the outline of a story is taking shape, from his toilsome deciphering of verbal lumps a flowing narrative emerges.

Leaning from the steep slope

I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings. I have noticed this ever since I have been in Pëtkwo. Every morning I leave the Kudgiwa Pension for my usual walk as far as the harbor. I go past the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while. If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Pëtkwo: a corrugated-iron roof that rests on four somewhat shaky poles and houses, lined up on a shelf, some recording barometers, hygrometers, and thermographs, with their rolls of lined paper, which turn with a slow clockwork ticking against an oscillating nib. The vane of an anemometer at the top of a tall antenna and the squat funnel of a pluviometer complete the fragile equipment of the observatory, which, isolated on the edge of an escarpment in the municipal garden, against the pearl-gray sky, uniform and motionless, seems a trap for cyclones, a lure set there to attract waterspouts from the remote tropical

oceans, offering itself already as the ideal relict of the fury of the hurricanes.

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

Monday.
Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison, toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an acrobat's feat—or, rather, a contortionist's—to get his arm through grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a prisoner's signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoners at all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone: the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and therefore something of what

constitutes my person would remain, would not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all memory of me. I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count.

Today I reached the belvedere from which you can glimpse, down below, a little stretch of beach, deserted, facing the gray sea. The wicker chairs with their high curved backs, like baskets, against the wind, arranged in a semicircle, seemed to suggest a world in which the human race has disappeared and things can do nothing but bespeak its absence. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.

I passed the belvedere again half an hour later. From one chair, its back to me, a little ribbon was flapping. I went down the steep promontory path, as far as a shelf from which the angle of vision changed. As I expected, seated in the chair, completely hidden by the wicker shields, there was Miss Zwida, in her white straw hat, her drawing pad open on her lap; she was copying a seashell. I was not pleased to see her; this morning's negative signs dissuaded me from striking up a conversation; for about three weeks now I have been encountering her alone in my walks on the cliffs and the dunes, and I want nothing more than to address her—indeed, it is with this intention that I come down from my pension every day, but every day something deters me.

Miss Zwida is staying at the Hotel of the Sea Lily; I went there to ask the desk clerk her name. Perhaps she found out; holiday people at this season in Pëtkwo are very few; the young ones could be counted on your fingers. Encountering me so often, she is perhaps expecting me to address her one day.

The motives that constitute an obstacle to a possible meeting between the two of us are several. In the first

place, Miss Zwida collects and draws seashells; I had a beautiful collection of shells, years ago, when I was a boy, but then I gave it up and have forgotten everything: classifications, morphology, geographical distribution of the various species. A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.

In addition there is the fact that this girl's application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration. If I were to approach Miss Zwida, I would have to express some appreciation of her drawings—which are of highly refined quality, for that matter, as far as I have been able to see—and therefore, at least at first, I would have to pretend to agree with an aesthetic and moral ideal that I reject, or else declare my feelings at the very start, with the risk of wounding her.

Third obstacle: the condition of my health, which, though much improved thanks to this stay by the sea on doctors' orders, affects my opportunities to go out and meet strangers; I am still subject to intermittent attacks, and especially to periodic worsening of a tiresome eczema, which discourages me from any notion of sociability.

Every now and then I exchange a few words with the meteorologist, Mr. Kauderer, when I meet him at the observatory. Mr. Kauderer always goes by at noon, to check the readings. He is a tall, thin man, with a gloomy

face, a bit like an American Indian. He rides along on his bicycle, staring straight ahead, as if maintaining his balance on the seat demanded all his concentration. He props his bicycle against the shed, slips a bag from the handlebars, and takes from it a ledger with broad, short pages. He climbs the steps to the platform and marks down the figures recorded by the instruments, some in pencil, others with a thick fountain pen, never relaxing his concentration for a second. He wears knickerbockers under a long topcoat; all his clothing is gray, or black-and-white check, including his visored cap. It is only when he has concluded these operations that he notices me observing him and greets me cordially.

I have come to realize that Mr. Kauderer's presence is important for me: that someone still evinces so much scrupulousness and methodical attention, though I know perfectly well it is all futile, has a reassuring effect on me, perhaps because it makes up for my vague way of living, about which—despite the conclusions I have reached—I continue to feel guilty. Therefore I stop and watch the meteorologist, and even converse with him, though it is not the conversation in itself that interests me. He talks to me about the weather, naturally, in detailed technical terms, and of the effects of the swings of pressure on the health, but also of the unsettled times in which we live, citing as example some episodes of local life or even news items he has read in the papers. At these moments he reveals a less reserved character than appears at first sight; indeed, he tends to warm to his subject and become verbose, especially in disapproving of the majority's way of acting and thinking, because he is a man who tends to be dissatisfied.

Today Mr. Kauderer told me that, because he is planning to go away for a few days, he will have to find someone to take his place in recording the data, but he does not know anyone he can trust. In the course of the conver-

sation he asked me if I would be interested in learning to read the meteorological instruments, in which case he would teach me. I did not answer yes or no, or at least I did not mean to give a precise answer, but I found myself beside him on the platform while he was explaining how to establish the maximum and the minimum, the progress of the pressure, the amount of precipitation, the velocity of the winds. In short, almost without my realizing it, he entrusted me with the job of replacing him for the next few days, starting tomorrow at noon. Though my acceptance was a bit forced, since I was given no time to reflect or to suggest that I could not make up my mind on the spot, this assignment does not displease me.

Tuesday.
This morning I spoke for the first time with Miss Zwida. The job of recording the meteorological readings certainly had a part in helping me overcome my hesitation, in the sense that, for the first time during my days at Pëtkwo, there was something previously established that I could not avoid; so that, however our conversation might go, at a quarter to twelve I would say, "Ah, I almost forgot: I must rush along to the observatory, because it is time to record the readings." And I would take my leave, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with relief, but in any event with the certainty that I could not do otherwise. I believe I already understood vaguely yesterday, when Mr. Kauderer made me the offer, that this assignment would encourage me to speak with Miss Zwida, but only now has the matter become clear to me—assuming that it is clear.

Miss Zwida was drawing a sea urchin. She was seated on a folding stool, on the pier. The sea urchin was lying on a rock, open; it contracted its prickles trying in vain to right itself. The girl's drawing was a study of the mollusk's soft pulp, as it dilated and contracted, rendered in chiaroscuro, and with thick, bristling cross-hatching all around. The speech I had in mind, on the form of seashells as a

deceptive harmony, a container concealing the true substance of nature, was no longer apposite. The sight of both the sea urchin and the drawing transmitted unpleasant and cruel sensations, like viscera exposed to the gaze. I struck up a conversation by saying that there was nothing harder to draw than a sea urchin: whether the container of prickles was seen from above, or whether the mollusk was overturned, despite the radial symmetry of its structure, it offered few pretexts for a linear rendering. She answered that she was interested in drawing it because it was an image that recurred in her dreams, and she wanted to rid herself of it. Taking my leave, I asked if we could see each other tomorrow morning at the same place. She said that tomorrow she had other engagements, but that the day after tomorrow she would be going out again with her drawing pad and I might easily meet her.

As I was checking the barometers, two men approached the shed. I had never seen them: bundled in heavy coats, dressed all in black, their collars turned up. They asked me whether Mr. Kauderer was there, then where had he gone, did I know his address, when he would be back. I answered that I didn't know and asked who they were and why they asked.

"It's not important," they said, going away.

Wednesday.
I went to the hotel to leave a bunch of violets for Miss Zwida. The desk clerk told me she had gone out early. I wandered around for a long time, hoping to run into her. In the yard before the fortress was the line of the prisoners' relatives: this is visiting day at the prison. In the midst of the humble women with kerchiefs on their heads and the crying children I saw Miss Zwida. Her face was covered by a black veil under the brim of her hat, but her demeanor was unmistakable: she stood with her head high, her neck straight and somehow haughty.