16
How not to deplore her resistance, insistently negated by the reality of the girls the Writer describes toward the end of the Book, in the mysterious chapter set in a nocturnal Paris, in the house of ill repute near the Champ de Mars, or perhaps on Mars itself?
Girls at 0.38 terrestrial gravity revolving between floor and ceiling, floating there, awaiting clients, the newest arrivals rising toward them with no more than a slight jump, capturing them in the air. The laughing certainty of those girls, skilled at dodging the client’s body, bending at the waist, spinning for a second before your embrace in the air.
And I, caught up in her spin, without a second’s resistance, her lips transmitting the impulse of her whole body to me, pivoting on my axis with the speed of a mechanical device. Seeing the beach again, the sea, the base of the cliff again, the gray of the sea, and the path of the moon on the water. Rising in circles, leaving a trail of blue-green bubbles in the air, a double helix of turbulence. Gliding across the sand easily, lightly, gripping her shoulders, pressing against her. Strong and natural as an embrace in a corridor of the metro, your body against hers, a river of strangers at your back, a crack in the tiles behind her neck. Her eyes, a sigh. God! The longest kiss ever!
17
But not, as the Writer had suggested and I myself, as well, under his influence, when I said: unfathomable quartzes. That had been replaced, in her eyes, by a superdense gel, a trap for cosmic particles with which she gazed at the sky, all the light of the first days of the universe in that gel, the weeks during which she had not ceased to study me, that light transformed into rays that now emerged from her eyes with the power of a spotlight illuminating a field and the sky over the field, at the far end of the runway, the furrows in the grass left by airplanes. The ease with which I could read it, the clarity, despite the distance across the confines of the sphere: projecting itself around me against the screen of clouds. A book, a sea of stories emanating serenely from her eyes, and we turned on the slow rhythm of its waves like a body electric.
The men who lived in her eyes like inclusions in a diamond, the sailboat and the captain with gold braid on his sleeves, whom I thought I’d seen that morning as I approached the window of her eyes on tiptoe, moved by the suspicion of something, the far-off silhouette of a soaring eagle describing a distant arc across the back of her iris, over that sailboat, the house on the shore, the woman looking out the window.
And I hadn’t believed my eyes, I had doubted that strange vision: the life she contained within herself. The pair of swordsmen who were now doing battle in her eyes on the circular stairway of a palace by the sea, first in sunshine, then in rain, engulfed in their capes, interminably. Killing mercilessly, then disappearing into the mass of men without the slightest sign of fatigue, leaving a trail of blood behind them that was visible from the sky, across the city.
And one of those men was me!
Me, Petya! Can you believe that?
But where was this city, where was this valley? Where was the palace by the sea? Was it Larissa who lay at the foot of the staircase, a purple bloodstain blooming on her dress? With whom would I have to fall in love now, Petya, in this new sequel? All in an instant, the vertigo of many paintings in a dark room, the second half of a film projected rapidly in front of us before we leave our seats and go into the street, exposing ourselves to the heat or chill outside.
Overwhelmed by the truth that such a thing could never be written, a work like that, a book infinitely greater than that of the Writer emanating from her eyes. However great my triumph might be, however clamorous my discrediting of the Commentator, there were more stories in her alone, in this woman, than in any of the books, an original sea in her eye with thousands of pages diluted in it. And I would never again take my eyes off a woman, never again settle them on the Book. Betraying, you’ll tell me, the Book for the woman I love. No matter, Petya, God will forgive me.
The circles of the swimming pools very far below our feet like springs welling up from an underground river of light, their turquoise waters flowing from that reservoir deep in the entrails of the earth, ascending along those veins to illuminate the night, the silver and alabaster vault of the Castle, the gold and quartz of its battlements. The sky lightening, the rosy-fingered dawn coming in to illuminate everything around us.
Isn’t it beautiful, that image: the rosy-fingered dawn? Isn’t it? Isn’t it true that what I’m saying is perfectly logical and makes sense? How astonishing and amazing it is that so much could be contained in a single Book?
EPILOGUE
Twelfth Commentary
1
“Oh merciless destiny, how sorely heavy hast thou stamped with both thy feet upon all the Persian race!” says the Writer, but when he says “Persian” it’s only a manner of speaking: neither Nelly nor Vasily is Persian. It’s simply that the Writer requires an ancient race, upon which, because of its antiquity, the weight of destiny will fall more visibly. How right one of his biographers is to affirm that all literary production prior to him “seems like a panoramic literature, a bird’s-eye view.” Because where another writer would simply have written “destiny,” in the sense that destiny fell on Vasily, the Writer has destiny jumping up and down on him — and with both feet!
Those feet that enter our visual field as they descend, the large, heavy feet of Kirpich and Raketa in their swanky Ferragamos. Though they didn’t trample on your father, that’s not what gangsters do nowadays, or only in the movies, to provide a more precise visual idea of the humiliation endured by the fallen man. Same thing with the Writer, in this passage where he speaks so wisely of the Persians and a thing as ancient as human dignity, which he places on the same level as the antiquity of the Persian race, all in that brilliant prose of his that seems to recast the literary erudition of the West beneath the enormous weight of the years.
All possible hues of literature in him, all sensibilities: so great a Writer! For at times he writes with the force and parsimony of Franz Kafka in Prague, in books that fall on us like a stroke of bad luck and distress us as profoundly as the death of a person we loved. Or else with the terrible obsession of the possessed, the bloodshot eyeball, the bitter misanthropy of a Thomas Bernhard, an author who was, curiously, subsequent. Or the faint gleam of those parts of the Book where the enigmatic words of Confucius blossom, without being him! Amalgamated into his unique style, cast in gold and silver. Not a cento, not a florilegium, not a chain of commentaries.
I could enumerate a thousand reasons to explain this to you, cite you his words in infinite numbers to illustrate what can appear to be a miracle: the breadth, the cosmic coherence, the profound ethical sensibility of the Book. Easier and more credible if taken for a miracle, the fruit of a roll of the dice, than for the vision that the Commentator slyly insinuates. Of an astute flaneur strolling through the literary wardrobe of the West and pilfering as he goes along, an overcoat here, a vest there, a pair of velvet gloves over there, a hat here.
An image against which my entire being and even my common sense rebels, and therefore I do not hesitate to exchange it at once for that of a prince, a king, a great personage whom I watch make his way into the forest of the years. Inclining with infinite humility before its carnelian and lapis lazuli fruits, harvesting authorities: here a diamond in Aeschylus (this being where he includes, in an astonishing great leap backward, the Persians), there a ruby in Stevenson, there a precious blue gem in Poe.