What? Did the bald man stay in this very room? I don’t know. Don’t go on about it. Run down to the hotel desk and ask the porter if you want to know.
Yes, he might have stayed here.
So what! That I was following him? Mad, quite mad — what on earth are you thinking of? He’d been dead two months by the time I left home.
It’s not true — you’re talking rubbish. No, it was not his grave I was looking for in the Protestant cemetery. It was the grave of a poet, a poor English writer. The only part that’s true is that the bald man once told me something about these famous graves. He himself is not buried there, though: his grave is in the cemetery on the outskirts, in a cheaper plot. In any case he wasn’t Protestant like the English poet. No, he was not a Jew. What was he? I have no idea. All I know is that he wasn’t religious.
I see from your look that you suspect something. You think I was secretly his lover after all and followed him here, to Rome? Nothing so sensational. There was nothing between us. Everything was very simple as far as he was concerned. God didn’t make him an interesting, artistic figure like you, my darling. No, he was more like a clerk or a retired schoolteacher.
There was nothing glamorous about him at all, nor around him. No woman ever killed herself for him. His name never appeared in the papers; there was no juicy gossip for him to be involved with. A long time ago, I once heard, he did have some kind of reputation. But by the time the war had ended he was quite forgotten. He was dead as a doornail as far as society was concerned.
Believe me, there is nothing at all interesting I can tell you about him. I don’t even have a photo of him. He didn’t like being photographed. Sometimes he behaved as if he were a dangerous criminal in hiding, afraid that someone might find his fingerprint on a glass he drank from. He was like a thief living under an assumed name. Well, yes, he was interesting, perhaps, but only in that he fought tooth and nail against the idea of being thought interesting. He’s not worth talking about.
Don’t blackmail me. I can’t stand it when you do that, begging and threatening at once. Do you want me to give him to you as well? Like the ring, and the U.S. dollars? Am I to give everything away? Do you want to leave me with nothing? Well, all right, I’ll give you this, too. Once you leave me, of course, I’ll be left utterly empty-handed. I’ll have nothing at all of my own. Is that what you want?
Fine, I’ll tell you. But don’t imagine it means you’ve outsmarted me or that you’re stronger than I am. It’s not that you’re stronger: it’s just me being weak.
It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s as if I wanted to talk about something that wasn’t quite there. I can only talk about tangible things — I mean, what exists in the simpler kind of everyday life. But there are people who live not only in the everyday but in another reality, on some other plane. Such people might be able to tell you about what isn’t there, and make it sound as interesting as a detective story. What this man told me was that everything was reality — not only tangible things you can actually grasp, but concepts too. If nothingness was a concept, he was interested in it. He’d hold nothingness in his hands, turn it about a bit, and look at it from every side, just as if it were an object. Don’t blink at me like that; I can see you don’t understand. I didn’t understand, either, but then, somehow or other, I did start to see my way through to it. Being in his company, I saw how in his hands, and in his mind, even the idea of nothingness was developing a reality; that it was growing and filling up with meaning. It was a trick he had … Don’t you bother with it, it’s too airy-fairy for people like us.
His name? Well, it was a name people recognized once. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t read any of his books before. When we first met I thought he was toying with me, as he did with everything and everybody. Then I got angry and sat down to read one of his books. Did I understand it? Yes, pretty well. He used simple words, the kind people actually use in conversation. He wrote about bread, and wine, about how people should eat, how they should walk, and what they should think about when walking. It was as if he were writing a textbook for simpletons who hadn’t the least idea how to live a meaningful life. That seemed to be the subject of the book. But it was a sly book, because under all the apparent naturalness of those big simple, idiotic things, under the kind-teacher tone, there was something else, a kind of grimace of indifference. It was as if behind everything — behind the book, behind the fact that he was a man writing a book, behind his idea of the reader holding the book in his hand, a reader now charmed, now solemn, now sentimental, a reader struggling to understand the book’s contents — there was a wicked adolescent watching and grinning with delight. That’s what I felt as I was reading it. I understood it line by line, but not the thing as a whole. I didn’t really get what he was after. I didn’t understand why he was writing books when he believed in neither literature nor readers. No reader, however carefully he studied this book, could ever discover what he actually thought. The more I read of his book, the angrier I grew. In fact I didn’t finish it, but threw it across the room.
Later, when I lived near him, I told him what I’d done. He heard me through with due seriousness, as if he were a priest or a tutor. He nodded. He pushed his glasses up to his forehead. And he agreed, utterly in sympathy:
“Disgraceful,” he said, and made a gesture, as if he himself would have thrown it, and all his other books, across the room. “I quite agree — it was disgraceful, quite disgusting.”
He gave a sad sigh, but he didn’t explain what exactly was the disgrace. Literature at large? The fact that I hadn’t understood his book? Or something that could not be written down? I didn’t dare ask him what it was. Because he treated words the way druggists treat poison. When I asked him the meaning of a word, he would look at me full of suspicion, the way a chemist might look at a hysterical woman who walks in with her hair all over the place and asks for a sleeping potion. Or the way a grocer looks when a weepy servant asks him for lye. He thought words were poison, that they contained something bitterly poisonous. You could only take them in very weak doses.
What did we talk about, you ask? Wait a minute. I’ll try to remember the kind of things he used to say. There isn’t much. Hardly a cent’s worth.
There was one occasion — during a bombing raid, when the entire population of the city was cowering in cellars, sweating and waiting for death — when he said humanity and the earth were of one fabric, and he quoted the fact that earth was thirty-five percent solid matter and sixty-five percent liquid. He had learned this from a Swiss book. He was very pleased with the fact. He talked about it as though it meant everything was going to be all right. Houses were collapsing around us, but he was not interested in bombed houses or in people cowering and sniveling in cellars. He started speaking about a German who lived a long time ago, a hundred years back or more — there’s a small café here in Rome where you and I have been a few times, it’s called the Greco, and that’s where he used to sit, that German, a hundred or more years ago. No, don’t bother racking your brains, I can’t remember his name either. What the bald man told me was that the German believed that plants and animals and the entire earth were of one fabric … do you understand? He was reading so intensely, in such a fevered way, throughout the weeks of bombing, it was as if he had failed to do something very important, as if his whole life had been occupied by something else. He’d been remiss and now there was no time to learn all he wanted to learn — stuff like how the world works and so on. I’d sit quietly in a corner looking at him, making fun of him. But he took no notice of me, the way he took no notice of the bombs that were falling around us.