If on a winter's night a traveler (8 page)

In a corner of the yard, as if observing the line at the

door of the prison, were the two men in black who had questioned me yesterday at the observatory.

The sea urchin, the little veil, the two strangers: the color black continues to appear to me in circumstances bound to attract my attention, messages that I interpret as a summons from the night. I realize that for a long time I have tended to reduce the presence of darkness in my life. The doctors' prohibition of going out after sunset has confined me for months within the boundaries of the daytime world. But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.

Wednesday evening.
Every evening I spend the first hours of darkness penning these pages, which I do not know if anyone will ever read. The
pâte de verre
globe in my room at the Kudgiwa Pension illuminates the flow of my writing, perhaps too nervous for a future reader to decipher. Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who,

setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.

Thursday.
Thanks to a special permit from the director's office—Miss Zwida explained to me—she can enter the prison on visitors' day and sit at the table in the parlor with her drawing pad and her charcoal. The simple humanity of the prisoners' relatives offers some interesting subjects for studies from life.

I had asked her no question, but since she had realized that I saw her yesterday in the yard, she felt it her duty to explain her presence in that place. I would have preferred her to tell me nothing, because I feel no attraction toward drawings of human figures and I would not have known how to comment on them if she had shown them to me, an eventuality that, however, did not occur. I thought those drawings were perhaps kept in a special album, which she left in the prison office between times, since yesterday—I recalled clearly—she did not have with her the inseparable bound album or her pencil box.

"If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things.

Miss Zwida proved at once to be in agreement: the object she would have drawn most willingly, she said, was one of those little anchors with four flukes, known as "grapnels," which the fishing boats use. She pointed some out to me as we passed the boats tied up at the dock, and she explained to me the difficulty that the four barbs represented for anyone wanting to draw them in their various angles and perspectives. I understood that the object contained a message for me, and I should decipher it: the

anchor, an exhortation to attach myself, to cling, to delve, to end my fluctuating condition, my remaining on the surface. But such an interpretation left room for doubts: this could also be an invitation to cast off, to set forth toward the open sea. Something in the grapnel's form, the four hooked teeth, the four iron arms worn by the scraping against the rock of the seabed, warned me that no decision would preclude laceration and suffering. Still, I could be relieved that it was not a heavy, ocean-going anchor, but a light little anchor: I was not therefore being asked to renounce the open-mindedness of youth, but only to linger for a moment, to reflect, to sound out the darkness of myself. "To be able to draw this object at my leisure from every point of view," Zwida said, "I should have one that I could keep with me and become familiar with. Do you think I could buy one from a fisherman?"

"We can ask," I said.

"Why do you not try to purchase one? I dare not do it myself, because a young lady from the city who shows interest in a crude fishermen's implement would arouse some wonder."

I saw myself in the act of presenting her with the iron grapnel as if it were a bunch of flowers: the image in its incongruity had a strident, fierce quality. Certainly a meaning was hidden there that eluded me; and, vowing to meditate on it calmly, I answered yes.

"I would like the grapnel with its hawser attached," Zwida specified. "I can spend hours drawing a heap of coiled rope. So ask for a very long rope: ten—no, twelve— meters."

Thursday evening.
The doctors have given me permission to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation. To celebrate the news, at sunset I entered the tavern, The Star of Sweden, to have a cup of hot rum. At the bar there were fishermen, customs agents, day laborers. Over all

their voices rang out the voice of one elderly man in the uniform of a prison guard, who was boasting drunkenly through the sea of chatter. "And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."

"Life and also death, you might say," interjected another drunk, whose profession, as I learned at once, was gravedigger. "With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig."

I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.

Friday.
The fisherman had become suspicious all of a sudden: "What do you need it for? What use do you have for a grapnel?"

These were indiscreet questions; I should have answered, "To draw it," but I knew Miss Zwida's shyness about revealing her artistic activity in an environment incapable of appreciating it; besides, the right answer, on my part, would have been, "To think about it," so just imagine whether I would have been understood.

"That is my business," I answered. We had started out conversing amiably, since we had met the night before at the tavern, but all of a sudden our dialogue had turned curt.

"Go to a ship's chandler," the fisherman said, brusquely. "I do not sell my belongings."

With the shopkeeper the same thing happened: as soon

as I asked my question, his face turned grim. "We can't sell such things to foreigners," he said. "We want no trouble with the police. And with a rope twelve meters long into the bargain... Not that I suspect you, but it would not be the first time somebody threw a grapnel up to the

bars of the prison, to help a prisoner escape..."

"Escape" is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations. The search for the anchor in which I am engaged seems to indicate to me an avenue of escape, perhaps of a metamorphosis, a resurrection. With a shudder I dismiss the thought that the prison is my mortal body and the escape that awaits me the separation of the soul, the beginning of a life beyond this earth.

Saturday.
It was my first outing at night after many months, and this caused me no little apprehension, especially because of the head colds to which I am subject; so before going out, I put on a balaclava helmet and over it a wool cap and, over that, a felt hat. Bundled up like this, and moreover with a scarf around my neck and another around my waist, a woolen jacket, a fur jacket, a leather coat, and lined boots, I could recover a certain security. The night, as I was then able to ascertain, was mild and serene. But I still failed to understand why Mr. Kauderer felt impelled to make an appointment with me at the cemetery, in the heart of the night, through a mysterious note delivered to me in great secrecy. If he had come back, why could we not meet as we had every day? And if he had not come back, whom was I on my way to meet at the cemetery?

To open the gate for me there was the gravedigger I had already met at The Star of Sweden. "I am looking for Mr. Kauderer," I said to him.

He answered, "Mr. Kauderer is not here. But since the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in."

I was proceeding among the gravestones when a swift, rustling shadow grazed me; it braked and got down from the seat. "Mr. Kauderer!" I exclaimed, amazed at seeing him ride around on his bicycle among the graves, his headlight turned off.

"Ssssh," he silenced me. "You are committing serious imprudences. When I entrusted the observatory to you, I did not suppose you would compromise yourself in an escape attempt. I must tell you we are opposed to individual escapes. You have to know how to wait. We have a more general plan to carry forward, a long-term plan."

Hearing him say "we" as he made a broad, sweeping gesture, I thought he was speaking in the name of the dead. It was the dead, whose spokesman Mr. Kauderer obviously was, who had declared they did not yet want to accept me among them. I felt an undeniable relief.

"It is also your fault that I shall have to prolong my absence," he added. "Tomorrow or the next day you will be summoned by the police chief, who will question you about the grapnel. Be very careful not to involve me in this business; bear in mind that the chief's questions will all be aimed at making you confess something involving me. You know nothing about me, except that I am traveling and I have not told you when I will be back. You can say that I asked you to take my place in recording the readings for a few days only. For that matter, starting tomorrow, you are relieved of the duty of going to the observatory."

"No! Not that!" I cried, gripped by a sudden desperation, as if at that moment I had realized that only the checking of the meteorological instruments enabled me to master the forces of the universe and recognize an order in it.

Sunday.
Early in the morning, I went to the meteorological observatory, I climbed on the platform, and I

stood there listening to the tick of the recording instruments, like the music of the celestial spheres. The wind sped through the morning sky, transporting soft clouds; the clouds arrayed themselves in cirrus festoons, then in cumuli; toward nine-thirty there was a rain shower, and the pluviometer collected a few centiliters; there followed a partial rainbow, of brief duration; the sky darkened again, the nib of the barograph descended, tracing an almost vertical line; the thunder rumbled and the hail rattled. From my position up there I felt as if I had the storms and the clear skies in my hand, the thunderbolts and the mists: not like a god, no, do not believe me mad, I did not feel I was Zeus the Thunderer, but a bit like a conductor who has before him a score already written and who knows that the sounds rising from the instruments correspond to a pattern of which he is the principal curator and possessor. The corrugated-iron roof resounded like a drum beneath the downpour; the anemometer spun; that universe all crashes and leaps was translatable into figures to be lined up in my ledger; a supreme calm presided over the texture of the cataclysms.

In that moment of harmony and fullness, a creak made me look down. Huddled between the steps of the platform and the supporting poles of the shed was a bearded man, dressed in a rough, striped tunic, soaked with rain. He was looking at me with pale, steady eyes.

"I have escaped," he said. "Do not betray me. You must go and inform someone. Will you? This person is at the Hotel of the Sea Lily."

I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.

[4]

Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.

And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.

Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its connotations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. But just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions.