— Are you looking for someone?
I turned at the sound of my classmate’s cordial voice. As we sat next to each other, his fingers kept time with the music as though somehow in time with events. He had greeted me easily, so I was only embarrassed at the start. There was no reason to reject his friendly smile. Everything was like before, as though nothing had happened. Those fine fingers went on juggling, and my classmate continued to dominate the conversation, a model of harmony between word and voice. It was remarkable how his eyes and lips served his thoughts. The same went for his body, hands, shoulders, throat. My classmate made himself the master of an agreeable closeness yet again. Our detour into small talk didn’t need to be prolonged: the chitchat might have become boring. At the critical moment, the point (that little blow from askance) would have to be driven home, the sharp edge of truth, glittering suddenly among pleasant chatter — the gesture that would lend a necessary trace of authenticity. He knew the scenario.
— Have you been having a hard time?
My classmate was discreetly thanking his savior. Naturally, if I hadn’t answered right away, he would have slipped away, and as far as possible.
A hard time? I’d been sustaining justice! I argued again, more convinced than an hour before, more convinced than an hour and a half before, and more convincing than he had been two hours before when he confronted the hostile crowd. I repeated his plea word for word. I hadn’t defended anyone, as I told him — conclusively — I had only revealed the assembly’s own hesitations, without tilting the balance, leaving them free to choose. Shaken by their trepidation, I had forgotten to vote myself. Then it was only a matter of his rising by my side and repeating the question to which no answer was expected.
— Are you looking for someone?
Following me from the dream where I couldn’t reach her, the tall, thin girl wore her hair like a clod of black earth gathered on top of her head. She hid her impatient eyes. My classmate turned toward me again — it seemed we both knew how the other would gesture or reply, and yet we still made each gesture and reply. He became animated while talking about girls. Our female classmates were locked away in school uniforms, and they’d probably condemn us to chastity for a long time to come.
— We should marry quickly if we want to accomplish something. Otherwise, we’ll fall right into the hands of the first coquette.
It was the moment to look him in the eye. I had to tell him what I thought, which is to say, I had to distort my words and phrases in such a way that it would seem I was lying or posing. Then the true thought would sink and disappear under a surplus of overly complicated concealments. I would wrap my thoughts in affected, precious phrases. I would look him straight in the eye, as I hadn’t done a moment ago when I was replaying my speech for him with my eyes fixed on some distant angle that sight could never reach.
— I hope eventually to find myself in the same office with a girl. To get used to her way of walking, her face, so that she becomes necessary to me, so that she understands my silences, my preferences, and then a tacit engagement will arise between us — gradually and increasingly intense, and everything will be implied in our ordinary movements, so that there won’t be any need for words. If it works out this way, one day I’ll buy two movie tickets and before saying goodnight, on the threshold I’ll ask her to stay with me forever. I hope she’ll agree with a simple nod of the head.
He began to smile, as I had expected. I was accepting everything ass-backward, without caring, asleep on my shelf.
— You should study literature. In reality, things are simpler or more complicated — or in any case, more random. Seriously, you should get started on a literary career.
He was smiling, as I had expected. He had pronounced the expected words.
— Literature? It’s only worth writing on walls anymore.
The sentence had to be finished with a slap on the back, and borrowing a gesture of his that he didn’t have the courage to make, but which he’d foreshadowed in the complicated ballet of his courtly gestures, I gave him a friendly slap on the back — the ultimate sign of acceptance and trust, and particularly of encouragement to embark upon his long and victorious road, which I had played a small part in guiding him toward.
I had decided it would be our last conversation as high-school students, and it was.
• • •
I had made friends with myself in the end. Without hostility, I kept an eye on my movements. They were harmonious, to all appearances. A faithful, amazed attendant on my own steps, I counted them from a pace behind, overjoyed they were mine, with their decisive stamp on the damp roadway, successfully traversing conventions of traffic, proficiently executing whatever bounds, twists, or reversals the unforeseen required. I advanced along the serpentines of various ages, an obedient robot, subject to hours, cities, and people, the brother who indifferently regarded his blind twin walking a step or an instant ahead. Nothing was happening in the game of adjournment, acrimony, and anesthesia. Being neither one nor the other, I had acquired the freedom to be sometimes one, sometimes the other — the one who remained the same in all operations, the “invariant” who had been provided and who had lived long ago in some other time by someone else — or never, by anyone. And so I advanced monotonously along uniform spirals and uniform hours, alongside uniform people heading toward uniform cities, submissive, too, like the one beside me — the double, my indifferent twin. Opportune, prompt as the waters of Lethe, forgetfulness would quickly erase everything, and the whole business would start over again, like yesterday, like tomorrow — whenever, or at no time.
With my eye screwed into the back of his neck, I rode on the young corpse’s back. The flesh was as flaccid as his arms. I accompanied all his staggering and his worn-out, falsified emotions. I fell in step with the suave, transparent twin who would agitate himself like a frenetic shadow on glass, ready to shatter. I tried to be a magnetic coating, able to intercept emotions, aspirate thoughts, able to infect his moods and ambitions, to concentrate and preserve myself in the depth, happy that nothing could be retained. All things happened in a watery, slippery way, or perhaps they had evaporated and were leftover bits of dust, unstable as the blade of a momentary wind.
I saw him — myself — pass through preliminary circles, as through Purgatory: I followed him into all the traps opened to him by her, the third person, the nameless, the only one that had a name — for the third person could have had any name, which is also to say no name at all — the bondswoman of his imagination, docile, foreign, and free of selfhood, cringing in grotesque little lying revolts, pointless attempts to increase the areas of irresponsibility in which “he” would transfer himself through her, the third person. I felt his body tested, convulsed, and electrically shocked by red spirals about to become heat and movement. He stopped on the spot, amazed by the intensity of his confrontation with the second person (“you”), who was flinging her hair over his eyes — his orbits — which was destiny coming to choose him, to test him. And with him I collapsed exhausted in the circle of such rings, in an ultimate vortex, reached only by the wind, the final boundary, the inferno of the interlocutor.