If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

  “Hey, weapons aren’t things to joke around with,” I say, and hold out a hand, but she trains the revolver on me.

  “Why not?” she says. “Women can’t, but you men can? The real revolution will be when women carry arms.”

  “And men are disarmed? Does that seem fair to you, comrade? Women armed to do what?”

  “To take your place. We on top, and you underneath. So you men can feel a bit of what it’s like to be a woman. Go on, move, go over there, go over beside your friend,” she commands, still aiming the weapon at me.

  “Irina has a certain constancy in her ideas,” Valerian warns me. “It’s no good contradicting her.”

  “And now?” I ask, and I look at Valerian, expecting him to intervene and put an end to the joke.

  Valerian’s eyes are on Irina, but his gaze is lost, as if he is in a trance, as if in absolute surrender, as if he expects pleasure only from submission to her whim.

  An outrider from Military High Command enters with a bundle of files. When it is opened, the door hides Irina, who disappears. Valerian, as if nothing had happened, deals with his tasks.

  “Tell me...” I ask him, as soon as we can speak. “Do those jokes seem right to you?”

  “Irina doesn’t joke,” he says, without raising his eyes from the papers. “You’ll see.”

  Now, from that moment, time changes shape, the night expands, the nights become a single night in the city crossed by our now inseparable trio, a single night that reaches its climax in Irina’s room, in a scene that is meant to be private but is also one of exhibition and challenge, the ceremony of that secret and sacrificial cult of which Irina is at once priestess and divinity, profaner and victim. The story resumes its interrupted progress; now the space that it must cover is overloaded, thick, it leaves no crevice open to the horror of the void among the geometric-patterned draperies, the pillows, the atmosphere impregnated with the odor of our naked bodies, Irina’s breasts barely protruding from her skinny chest, the dark areolas that would be more in proportion on a more swollen bosom, the narrow, pointed pubes in the form of an isosceles triangle (the word “isosceles,” once I had associated it with Irina’s pubes, is charged for me with such sensuality that I cannot say it without making my teeth chatter). Near the center of the scene, the lines tend to twist, to become sinuous like the smoke from the brazier where she is burning the poor surviving aromas from an Armenian spice shop whose borrowed fame as an opium den had sparked the looting by the mob avenging morality, to twist—the lines again—like the invisible rope that binds us, the three of us, and the more we writhe to free ourselves the more our knots tighten, dig into our flesh. In the center of this tangle, in the heart of the drama of this secret association of ours, there is the secret I bear within me and cannot reveal to anyone, least of all to Irina and Valerian, the secret mission that has been entrusted to me: to discover the identity of the spy who has infiltrated the Revolutionary Committee and who is about to deliver the city into the hands of the Whites.

  In the midst of the revolutions which that windy winter swept the streets of the capital like gusts of the north wind, a secret revolution was being born, which would transform the powers of bodies and sexes: this Irina believed, and she had succeeded in imposing this belief not only on Valerian, who, a district judge’s son with a degree in political economy, follower of Indian sages and Swiss theosophists, was the preordained adept of every doctrine within the confines of the conceivable, but also on me, who came from such a harder school, on me, who knew that in a short time the future was going to be decided between the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Whites’ Court-Martial, and that two firing squads, one on one side and one on the other, were waiting with their weapons at order arms.

  I tried to escape, insinuating myself with crawling movements toward the center of the spirals, where the lines slithered like serpents following the writhing of Irina’s limbs, supple and restless, in a slow dance where it is not the rhythm that counts but the knotting and loosening of serpentine lines. There are two serpents whose heads Irina grasps with her hands, and they react to her grasp, intensifying their own aptitude for rectilinear penetration, while she was insisting, on the contrary, that the maximum of controlled power should correspond to a reptile pliability bending to overtake her in impossible contortions.

  Because this was the first article of faith of the cult Irina had established: that we abandon the standard idea of verticality, of the straight line, the surviving ill-concealed male pride that had remained with us even when we accepted our condition as slaves of a woman who allowed no jealousies between us, no supremacies of any kind. “Down,” Irina said, and her hand pressed the back of Valerian’s head, her fingers sinking into the young economist’s woolly hair, a straw-red color, not allowing him to raise his face to the level of her womb, “farther down!” And meanwhile she looked at me with diamond eyes and wanted me to watch, wanted our two gazes also to proceed along serpentine and continuous paths. I felt her gaze which did not abandon me for an instant, and meanwhile I felt on me another gaze which followed me at every moment and in every place, the gaze of an invisible power that was expecting of me only one thing: death, no matter whether it was the death I was to bring to others, or my own.

  I was awaiting the moment when the thong of Irina’s gaze would be loosened. There: she half-closes her eyes; there: I am slithering in the shadow, behind the pillows, the sofas, the brazier; there: where Valerian has left his clothes folded in perfect order, as is his habit, I crawl in the shadow of Irina’s lowered eyelids, I search Valerian’s pockets, his wallet, I hide in the darkness of her clenched eyelids, in the darkness of the cry that comes from her throat, I find the paper, folded double, with my name written by a steel nib, under the formula of the death sentence for treason, signed and countersigned below the regimental rubber stamps.

  [5]

  At this point they throw open the discussion. Events, characters, settings, impressions are thrust aside, to make room for the general concepts.

  “The polymorphic-perverse sexuality...”

  “The laws of a market economy...”

  “The homologies of the signifying structures...”

  “Deviation and institutions...”

  “Castration...”

  Only you have remained suspended there, you and Ludmilla, while nobody else thinks of continuing the reading.

  You move closer to Lotaria, reach out one hand toward the loose sheets in front of her, and ask, “May I?”; you try to gain possession of the novel. But it is not a book: it is one signature that has been torn out. Where is the rest?

  “Excuse me, I was looking for the other pages, the rest,” you say.

  “The rest?...Oh, there’s enough material here to discuss for a month. Aren’t you satisfied?”

  “I didn’t mean to discuss; I wanted to read...” you say.

  “Listen, there are so many study groups, and the Erulo-Altaic Department had only one copy, so we’ve divided it up; the division caused some argument, the book came to pieces, but I really believe I captured the best part.”

  Seated at a café table, you sum up the situation, you and Ludmilla. “To recapitulate: Without fear of wind or vertigo is not Leaning from the steep slope, which, in turn, is not Outside the town of Malbork, which is quite different from If on a winter’s night a traveler. The only thing we can do is go to the source of all this confusion.”

  “Yes. It’s the publishing house that subjected us to these frustrations, so it’s the publishing house that owes us satisfaction. We must go and ask them.”

  “If Ahti and Viljandi are the same person?”

  “First of all, ask about If on a winter’s night a traveler, make them give us a complete copy, and also a complete copy of Outside the town of Malbork. I mean copies of the novels we began to read, thinking they had that title; and then, if their real titles and authors are different, the publishers must tell us and explain the mystery behind these pages that move from one vo
lume to another.”

  “And in this way,” you add, “perhaps we will find a trail that will lead us to Leaning from the steep slope, unfinished or completed, whichever it may be...”

  “I must admit,” Ludmilla says, “that when I heard the rest had been found, I allowed my hopes to rise.”

  “...and also to Without fear of wind or vertigo, which is the one I’d be impatient to go on with now....”

  “Yes, me, too, though I have to say it isn’t my ideal novel....”

  Here we go again. The minute you think you’re on the right track, you promptly find yourself blocked by a switch: in your reading, in the search for the lost book, in the identification of Ludmilla’s tastes.

  “The novel I would most like to read at this moment,” Ludmilla explains, “should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves....”

  On this point you are in immediate agreement with her; putting behind you pages lacerated by intellectual analyses, you dream of rediscovering a condition of natural reading, innocent, primitive....

  “We must find again the thread that has been lost,” you say. “Let’s go to the publishers’ right now.”

  And she says, “There’s no need for both of us to confront them. You go and then report.”

  You’re hurt. This hunt excites you because you’re pursuing it with her, because the two of you can experience it together and discuss it as you are experiencing it. Now, just when you thought you had reached an accord with her, an intimacy, not so much because now you also call each other tu, but because you feel like a pair of accomplices in an enterprise that perhaps nobody else can understand.

  “Why don’t you want to come?”

  “On principle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else. I know that if I cross that boundary, even as an exception, by chance, I risk being mixed up in this advancing tide; that’s why I refuse to set foot inside a publishing house, even for a few minutes.”

  “What about me, then?” you reply.

  “I don’t know about you. Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.”

  There’s no making this woman change her mind. You will carry out the expedition by yourself, and you and she will meet here again, in this café, at six.

  “You’ve come about your manuscript? It’s with the reader; no, I’m getting that wrong, it’s been read, very interesting, of course, now I remember! Remarkable sense of language, heartfelt denunciation, didn’t you receive our letter? We’re very sorry to have to tell you, in the letter it’s all explained, we sent it some time ago, the mail is so slow these days, you’ll receive it of course, our list is overloaded, unfavorable economic situation. Ah, you see? You’ve received it. And what else did it say? Thanking you for having allowed us to read it, we will return it promptly. Ah, you’ve come to collect the manuscript? No, we haven’t found it, do just be patient a bit longer, it’ll turn up, nothing is ever lost here, only today we found a manuscript we’d been looking for these past ten years, oh, not another ten years, we’ll find yours sooner, at least let’s hope so, we have so many manuscripts, piles this high, if you like we’ll show them to you, of course you want your own, not somebody else’s, that’s obvious, I mean we preserve so many manuscripts we don’t care a fig about, we’d hardly throw away yours which means so much to us, no, not to publish it, it means so much for us to give it back to you.”

  The speaker is a little man, shrunken and bent, who seems to shrink and bend more and more every time anyone calls him, tugs at his sleeve, presents a problem to him, empties a pile of proofs into his arms. “Mr. Cavedagna!” “Look, Mr. Cavedagna!” “We’ll ask Mr. Cavedagna!” And every time, he concentrates on the query of the latest interlocutor, his eyes staring, his chin quivering, his neck twisting in the effort to keep pending and in plain view all the other unresolved queries, with the mournful patience of overnervous people and the ultrasonic nervousness of overpatient people.

  When you came into the main office of the publishing firm and explained to the doormen the problem of the wrongly bound books you would like to exchange, first they told you to go to Administration; then, when you added that it wasn’t only the exchange of books that interested you but also an explanation of what had happened, they sent you to Production; and when you made it clear that what mattered to you was the continuation of the story of the interrupted novels, “Then you’d better speak with our Mr. Cavedagna,” they concluded. “Have a seat in the waiting room; some others are already in there; your turn will come.”

  And so, making your way among the other visitors, you heard Mr. Cavedagna begin several times the story of the manuscript that couldn’t be found, each time addressing different people, yourself included, and each time being interrupted before realizing his mistake, by visitors or by other editors and employees. You realize at once that Mr. Cavedagna is that person indispensable to every firm’s staff, on whose shoulders his colleagues tend instinctively to unload all the most complex and tricky jobs. Just as you are about to speak to him, someone arrives bearing a production schedule for the next five years to be brought up to date, or an index of names in which all the page numbers must be changed, or an edition of Dostoyevsky that has to be reset from beginning to end because every time it reads Maria now it should read Mar’ja and every time it says Pyotr it has to be corrected to Pëtr. He listens to everybody, though always tormented by the thought of having broken off the conversation with a previous postulant, and as soon as he can he tries to appease the more impatient, assuring them he hasn’t forgotten them, he is keeping their problem in mind. “We much admired the atmosphere of fantasy....” (“What?” says a historian of Trotskyite splinter groups in New Zealand, with a jolt.) “Perhaps you should tone down some of the scatological images....” (“What are you talking about?” protests a specialist in the macroeconomy of the oligopolises.)

  Suddenly Mr. Cavedagna disappears. The corridors of the publishing house are full of snares: drama cooperatives from psychiatric hospitals roam through them, groups devoted to group analysis, feminist commandos. Mr. Cavedagna, at every step, risks being captured, besieged, swamped.

  You have turned up here at a time when those hanging around publishing houses are no longer aspiring poets or novelists, as in the past, would-be poetesses or lady writers; this is the moment (in the history of Western culture) when self-realization on paper is sought not so much by isolated individuals as by collectives: study seminars, working parties, research teams, as if intellectual labor were too dismaying to be faced alone. The figure of the author has become plural and moves always in a group, because nobody can be delegated to represent anybody: four ex-convicts of whom one is an escapee, three former patients with their male nurse and the male nurse’s manuscript Or else there are pairs, not necessarily but tendentially husband and wife, as if the shared life of a couple had no greater consolation than the production of manuscripts.

  Each of these characters has asked to speak with the person in charge of a certain department or the expert in a certain area, but they all end up being shown in to Mr. Cavedagna. Waves of talk from which surface the vocabularies of the most specialized and most exclusive disciplines and sc
hools are poured over this elderly editor, whom at first glance you defined as “a little man, shrunken and bent,” not because he is more of a little man, more shrunken, more bent than so many others, or because the words “little man, shrunken and bent” are part of his way of expressing himself, but because he seems to have come from a world where they still—no: he seems to have emerged from a book where you still encounter—you’ve got it: he seems to have come from a world in which they still read books where you encounter “little men, shrunken and bent.”

  Without allowing himself to be distracted, he lets the arrays of problems flow over his bald pate, he shakes his head, and he tries to confine the question to its more practical aspects: “But couldn’t you, forgive me for asking, include the footnotes in the body of the text, and perhaps condense the text a bit, and even—the decision is yours—turn it into a footnote?”

  “I’m a reader, only a reader, not an author,” you hasten to declare, like a man rushing to the aid of somebody about to make a misstep.

  “Oh, really? Good, good! I’m delighted!” And the glance he gives you really is a look of friendliness and gratitude. “I’m so pleased. I come across fewer and fewer readers....”

  He is overcome by a confidential urge: he lets himself be carried away; he forgets his other tasks; he takes you aside. “I’ve been working for years and years for this publisher ... so many books pass through my hands ... but can I say that I read? This isn’t what I call reading.... In my village there were few books, but I used to read, yes, in those days I did read.... I keep thinking that when I retire I’ll go back to my village and take up reading again, as before. Every now and then I set a book aside, I’ll read this when I retire, I tell myself, but then I think that it won’t be the same thing any more.... Last night I had a dream, I was in my village, in the chicken coop of our house, I was looking, looking for something in the chicken coop, in the basket where the hens lay their eggs, and what did I find? A book, one of the books I read when I was a boy, a cheap edition, the pages tattered, the black-and-white engravings all colored, by me, with crayons ... You know? As a boy, in order to read, I would hide in the chicken coop....”