The beads of detail and mechanical analysis string themselves around the third person: she, the third person — invented, abstract, illusory, bearing any burden, any loan, any pirouette — is nothing but a chubby infant with a faint mustache and blue eyes — innocent and illogical — who transports, conductively and hospitably, the director’s needs, ambitions, and the pride of his glory, his garrulity, his pedantry, his perversity. The slave of the unforeseen, of the other’s — or of an imagined — plan, ready to trade everything for a tiny, tender, indulgent, attentive promise of protection, in the hopes of somehow seizing, possessing, binding, and imprisoning him, in order to make herself whole, to define herself.
For this sense of self-definition (or another equivalent), in which we might recognize our own larval panting — agitated by rapid contraries absorbed by their own exhaustion as in sleep — the accomplice backstage would believe himself justified in denying her, in shattering her, in sacrificing her, while assuming not only the responsibility for the execution but even the obligation to redeem or justify his own invisible, useless role in the equation, and in haste might attempt to ignore the fictional alternative, the restaging of a failure from long ago.
. . She must return to the beginning of the downward roll, from the peak of the inclined plane — not from absurd, hypothetical alternatives — before she begins to run dizzily after whatever deceptive call, before she pointlessly drifted toward some unknown man: in a boat full of other unknowns advancing toward the unknown, in a train compartment with nameless and faceless passengers. Sly messages in the personal columns of illustrated magazines, fairy tales for little gingerbread pianists. Unless the telephone didn’t somehow get her out of one trouble in the nick of time, only to hurl her back into another.
• • •
She would find the energy to survive on any conveyor belt — carried from one place to another, from one illusion to another. By taxi or tram or train, ark or airplane or automobile. In any train then, as long as she goes on having the power to utter cries, which is to say, to go on breathing: being reborn after each new failure — she would be the same.
The experience would involve fretting along the corridor, looking for someone to talk to and then rummaging through their good intentions, their gentle, long-abandoned dreams, passing hastily through the compartments of their past — as well as their present — desperately wanting to lean in beside them with vague desires and murky cravings.
She would look for semblables, dreamy creatures used to lining up like obedient soldiers, one behind the other, for hours, years, lifespans. The journey seemed to be an act of liberation: her neighbor might be the very person she was waiting for, with whom she might flee, might escape. In the narrow corridor, in the little plush-lined compartments, the strangers look at each other, inquiring reciprocally into each other’s hidden identities with fugitives’ eyes, eager to roll the dice.
Beside her, the gentleman seems like a mirror of his own silence. The young woman across the way — the very image of a smile gone astray — her slightly maladaptive personality constantly searching for the right place for her suitcase, plump hands, illusions, and small baggage as disorderly as her hair: the long, black, frisky (overly frisky, too curly) ringlets. This overly agitated, overly ample, overly impatient person could be the perfect likeness of the little angel parodied by the poor professor.
It would be in vain to oppose or resist: the voice of this plump traveler might signify the truth of her being. Her restless hunger for the bustle of new things, neighborhoods, and unexpected events, which could be — who knows? — only the explosion of fatigue. She cannot convert her energy — expended in the zigzags of her quests: false hope, false despair like lightning without thunder — into another reserved, potential energy. If she could find the resources within herself for another sadness or dignity, if these deserve to be found, if worthy and true sorrows actually exist, she might have become a bride, a mother, an industrious housewife.
Speculations whirl around her. She grows from the suppositions. Those around her try to remain unaffected by her frayed appearance, by her navy blue ski pants scrunched over her thighs, by her worn military boots. But it would be in vain to resist gasping at the enchanting voice of a disguised goddess in borrowed clothes.
There she is: watching from her corner near the door, wanting to extract a book, a magazine, a newspaper from the crammed briefcase. She will go out in the corridor, pass in front of the other compartments, look at the travelers, and offer herself to their glances. Exhausted, abandoned, there’ll be nothing left to do but to lean against the window to the right of the neighboring compartment. The journey will end somewhere, sometime; the heavy iron bird will open its rusty beak and discharge the little group of the deceived. Torn by febrile, spectral gestures, the convoy will scatter. The luckiest will rapidly recognize the end of the adventure. Only a few belated dreamers will try to prolong their truancy, delay their return, prolong their liberty for at least another second. They too will be brought back, more obedient than before; she will see herself multiplied in hundreds of twins lined up in their same old rows, frightened by future temptations to escape, protected by their zealous submission. Standing close to each other now, the traveler and the disguised goddess lean against the metal window bar. Raising the little transistor with his right hand, he has just come out of the neighboring compartment. Remaining silent, they look at the scenery.
— Handel’s Chaconne in G major.
She would give him a sly look in quarter profile first before letting her voice ripple forth.
— That’s Handel’s Chaconne in G Major.
And he would quiver in amazement.
— Yes, music is my business, you know. Where am I going? Me? Far away. All the way to the Apuseni Mountains. I change trains two more times. To see my mother. She’s in a madhouse. The war, the camp. Her husband killed before her eyes, in front of the grave he was forced to dig for himself.
Between them, the wheels turn expectation into impatience. Her little whimpers will make themselves heard. The other travelers in the corridor will hear her voice, and they will laugh. Anyone willing to exchange a few words with this unhappy woman will know what haunts her: she’ll tell you her story, and she’ll convince you that the dead are dead, and will manage to forget everything — it’s foolish to travel great distances for something like this: forgetting can be done anywhere and especially where there are crowds of people, possibilities of all kinds; the wilderness doesn’t honor mourning — the dead do not exist, even if they were our brothers and sisters and parents: life is and is and is.
The road has barely stretched itself out, time is distant, in the future, tolerant. She will try complicity, she will playfully endure time, and she will find pleasure in her fleshy transgressions. Definitely, the destination has no importance; with an ally by her side, she will always feel free to wander, to run — to the mountains at the end of the world, to submit, to slave, to devote herself, to be able to drain him of sentiment, nostalgia, secrets, and sorrows, to strangle him lovingly. Far away, in the distance, as far away as possible, like the deceptive illusions of childhood. The iron bird, its belly populated by captives, runs on crazily, crazily.