“A single image spark from any place whatsoever — strange that its name always accompanied the flash as well — allowed one to see the entire globe — what used to be called the ecumene, the inhabited world, and reinforced the conviction that we all belong together; made sure that one was face-to-face with the world, including the world of the future, which accordingly seemed eternal, and could exclaim, in all seriousness: Oh happy day!”—“The images were epiphanies. They were epiphanies in the sense in which people used to say: I have had an epiphany. True, they were always the briefest of the brief. But who is to say that the other ones, the reported epiphanies, lasted any longer? And before the loss of images: who said that there were no more epiphanies? Perhaps there has never been anything more than our suddenly appearing and promptly vanishing lightning images?”—“The images were the last inspirations.”
“In the image, internal and external seemed to be fused into a third element, greater and more lasting. The images represented the value to end all values. They were our seemingly safest form of capital. Mankind’s last treasure.” (Three guesses as to which of the two said that.)—“With the images I plunged into the maternal world.” (Three guesses as to who …)—“It was perhaps not my man, but rather merely — merely? — the image inside me that binds me to him forever, and it was my man after all, the one I wanted, body and soul!” (But that, too, came from her!)
“Whenever an image allowed me to see it, it was the answer to an unconscious prayer, a prayer I was not aware was on its way. In the image I was redeemed every day, and opened up, but not for any religion. In the daily image I became a different person, but not for an ideology, not for a mass movement.”—“In the images appeared what was beautiful and what was right, but not the way they appear in any philosophy, sociology, theology, economics — simply appearing, instead of being asserted, thought, or proclaimed. And they were also different from memories, including the so-called collective ones.”—“The image manifested itself outside of legend and myth. The image — how marvelously myth-free it was — just the image, both the switchboard and switch.”—“Physicists: instead of smashing atoms, etc.: map a physics of the images!”
“The loss of images is the most painful of losses.”—“It means the loss of the world. It means: there is no more seeing. It means: one’s perception slides off every possible constellation. It means: there is no longer any constellation.” —“We will have to live without the image for the time being.” —“For the time being. But isn’t precisely such a loss accompanied by energy, even if this energy is undirected for the time being?”—“Cuerpo del mundo. Body of the world. We, the banished, full of passion.”
The author then said, among other things: “How appalled I am at myself that the images that once meant everything to me have been shattered. A leaf had only to move, and I would become a player in the widest world. A scrap of blue morning sky in the blue night sky. A train passing in the dark with all its windows lit up. The eyes of people in a crowd, the eyes especially! The stubbly beard of the man condemned to death. The mountains of shoes from those who were gassed. The thistle silk blown in little balls by the wind across the savannah. In the image I embraced the world, you, us. Images, refuges, dark sheltering niches. Nothing meant more to me than the image. And now — and you?”
The images he had evoked there: Were those, after all, not the sort she meant? Had she been mistaken in the author? Was he the wrong one? But then he launched into the following litany, which reassured her: “Images, you world-arrows. Images, you world-encompassers. Images, do not let me be orphaned. Image, you grounded perception. Imagen, mi norte (= guide) y mi luz. Images, let life appear to us. Image, word in the universal language. Image, as light as a shed snakeskin. Image, most lasting of all afterimages. Images, you capital realities. Image, give me the world, and let me forget the world. Image, acknowledgment of what has been lived, impetus for what is yet to be lived. In the image the hospitable and enduringly hospitable globe. Image, you who indicate to me that I am still on the right path. Images, you pure opposite number. O image, my life spirit: show me the space where you are hiding.”
And she: “Perhaps I will found an image bank, a new, different world bank, on the basis of the science of images, which, as I picture it, will create a sweetness and prove fruitful like hardly any science before it. A science that will encompass all the others. Or I will act in a film again.”
For a while they then laughed together, silently and from ear to ear. And finally the author made a speech about today’s pencils, which were utterly worthless; above all, the leads, often enclosed in two halves made of different kinds of wood, kept breaking off during sharpening; wood and graphite — if they still were wood and graphite — no longer had any “smell and taste,” in the sense of musk, in which, according to the old Arabs, “smell and taste combine”; also the sound of pencil on paper was no longer the same as before, and the cracking, grinding, and squeaking when one sharpened them and held one’s ear to the sharpener, or vice versa, was outrageous; just putting the finally sharpened lead to paper was a game of chance; even the good old Cumberlands now had low-quality wood and were badly glued; only his “school pencil” had not left him completely in the lurch when it came to managing; down with modern pencils! (His activity, too, was “managing.”) Or not so after all! His favorite pencil bore the inscription EAN, which means “let” in Greek. And she saw that the cuffs of his pants were full of pencil shavings.
That night they alternated among languages. In every language, the two of them had a similar accent: that of villagers, of aldeanos. Like her, the author came from a village, and she and he had met here in a third village.
Finally they were no longer speaking. The light in the hall or storeroom, consisting in any case merely of a few bare bulbs, was switched off. Through the glass door, the moonlit steppe; darkness inside the almacén. The author poured her another glass of steppe wine and left the room. The quince, safurdzul, dunja, from the other tree in the inner courtyard, lightly steamed, that he brought her as dessert, was doubled by the one she had earlier secretly plucked herself. Perhaps thinking that in him, the author, all the threads had to come together, he also brought her the telephone, for a nocturnal call to her property on the outskirts of the distant riverport city.
As she placed the call, out of the corner of her eye she saw on the glass door a single leaf of ivy, or whatever, moving, and taking on the form of someone long awaited. On the telephone: the half-grown neighbor boy from the porter’s lodge. A Spanish proverb occurred to her: “Wipe the neighbor boy’s nose and put him in your house.” And she spoke to him as the guardian of her house. That morning, he told her, the idiot of the outskirts had come toward him, carrying heavy loads in both hands, and while still far off had shifted the load to his left hand, so as to offer the boy his right. And now the idiot was making his rounds, singing and yelling through the empty streets, as reliable as the local night watchman.
But then she heard him say: “I would like to go to my room now.”—“Where is your room?” she asked. — His reply: “Where all the toys are.”