There are names, experiences, upon which a good person, educated in the Book, must never set eyes or think of. Not in pursuit of greater knowledge, not in pursuit of cultural breadth. A culture and an erudition that are false!
A man — forgive me for insisting upon this point — incapable of thinking straight or of writing with the unvarying frankness of a truly great author, and who, on the single occasion he met the Writer, during a ride in an automobile, didn’t exchange a word with him but only exclaimed, toward the end, with feigned astonishment, “Sir, you slow and accelerate the rotation of the earth at your pleasure: you are greater than God.”
Greater than God? How could anyone claim to be greater than God?
The Writer never claimed that, or to have made any great scientific advance, discovered any practical application for his Book, for the fragments or blue stones of Time he holds in his hands in volume 7 and gazes at in amazement, for, having taken his sincerity further than any other Writer in the world, each time he has asked himself What is time? he has been able only to keep himself from lying, only to confess, to respond, wisely and with absolute sincerity, with Augustinian wisdom: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Or, what amounts to the same thing: We must never imagine the solution of imposture, never pretend to be more than God. Better to entrust ourselves to our fate.
6
But I already told you about my blindness, when I mentioned to you and commented extensively on that phrase by the Writer where he says, quite rightly: he was a good man. And allow me to add: naive.
Who took some time to understand the slander that another man, a false youth, a gentleman of Germanic surname, Aschenbach, put out against the Writer. A jeweler in Santa Monica whom I saw reading in his shop, and who did not get up when I went in, but put down the book he was reading to attend to me, placing it facedown.
So that I could read, decipher the title in English, and shiver in wonder: What? You have the Book, too? You know the Writer, too? And read him with veneration? And I asked his permission to pick it up and examined it rapturously, Petya, not understanding anything in that language, but leafing through it in ecstasy, surrendering before it.
Until I heard him speaking of the Writer as a standard-bearer — you know, Petya? — and I came to realize. That he was reading it because supposedly only in its pages would he find a knowledge and a comprehension, an exact and inclusive portrait of all the colors of the rainbow. I was horrified to hear this. The Writer as a standard-bearer!
I would dedicate an entire book, years of my life, to demonstrate the falsity in that, to clean … Petya, I couldn’t stop myself from leaping over the counter to beat him in rage, until his mouth was bleeding, the mouth that had spoken ill of the Writer and said those things, odious prevarications, never!
An instrumental use, Petya — as if the Book were some sort of manifesto. Never! I beat him until someone, an accomplice of his, his employee (Tadzio! I heard him call him, Tadzio!), must have hit me on the back and I collapsed unconscious on the floor.
7
The beating I got in my turn, the interrogation I was subjected to. The tooth I spat out at my feet: blood and saliva. The things I howled: Is he not an imposter? Is he not assuming the personality of another man? Is he not using his words? Is he not putting in the mouth of a single Writer the words of many other writers? Is he not eternally falling into the fallacy of amalgamating many writers into one?
On the floor of the police station, my body aching but without regretting for one second having assaulted that man. All of him false (his horrible teeth, like a young man’s), propagator of those nauseating falsehoods about the Writer. Unable to bear so much deception, so many lies: as if there, so far from death, from the place where he must be, Batyk were speaking through his mouth. But why should it matter to me: I know your mother, I know your father, I know you, Petya — all of you are full of respect for the Book.
Quelle horreur that in America, horrible Amerika, the horrible Americans should devote themselves to staining and outraging the Writer’s memory. And I leapt on him the instant I understood the ignominious intent of his words until someone, his employee, as I told you.
I wept that night on the floor of the police station but did not say, did not permit myself to say, did not sully my lips with the words of so filthy an accusation. The police unable to find an explanation or determine what had triggered (like a gun) my rage. What a child I was! How ingenuous my reaction! The shiver I felt, full of admiration, when I found him reading and saw what book it was. And how he displayed it to me in delight, believing me to belong to his cult, a worshipper of the same god.
They didn’t understand a word, the police. They beat me all morning, powerless, a feeling of impotence growing within them. Hearing me speak in that foreign language, so obviously a foreigner (there’s only one small territory on the globe where I’m not, and therefore I am a foreigner more than I am anything else).
Cuban? Cuban! I told them a thousand times. What does it matter? Cuban, yes! And I was dealt another blow. Why, then, does no one here understand you? Jorge is from Puerto Rico: Martínez, Pedro, they don’t understand a word. And he slammed his broad fist, its fingers tightly clenched — let me tell you — into my stomach again. And the questions rained down again: “Who are you talking about? Who are Pierre Hélie, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Borges?”
I looked out at them through a single eye: they’re all French, I told them, or no, from South America, from a country, I don’t remember which one (I don’t know why I thought that if I said Argentina they’d beat me with even greater fury). I woke up that morning on the floor of the cell, and through the window high above me, when I’d risen to my feet and hoisted myself up by the bars, I saw the sea. A wine-dark sea. I wept …
8
Exhausted now, like a swimmer who’s abandoned all struggle and floats without reaching any shore, a man who on one afternoon of his life, full of strength, has the idea — in the Writer, in John Cheever — of crossing through the swimming pools of his neighbors, behind those gigantic Californian houses, and dives through their subterranean branches without finding a way out, the way home, lost in the labyrinth, dying there. Or like a swimmer in time, borne up by the whole movement of the wave and down by the whole movement of the wave, without there being any merit in him.
Up to the service of the last emperor of Russia. The happy days after the journey to Barataria and the successful sale of the diamonds (which I didn’t tell you about), the night of the great ball, when the kingdom seemed to be at hand and I saw your mother as a queen, and flew with her over the blue and white Castle, its galactic blue glittering from the sky.
Down to that flat city, the entirely pernicious example of so many low houses, like a valid refutation of the idea of a king. And still lower, to the floor of the police station, beaten. All my efforts seeming to have led me to nothing, and left me without any desire, for the first time in years, to go down to the sea. The city awakening, its men and women breakfasting on enormous glasses of milk, steam rising from the plates that waiters held up against the sunlight as they came out of the kitchen.
(How to bring her back? How marvelous it would be to make the journey to see her, simply going down the stairs and standing on the lookout on Alondra Boulevard where the taxis pass by, having first lied to Larissa about where I was going. Waiting for one impatiently, getting in full of air, floating in the backseat like those balloons we take home from a party and push inside a taxi, riding along smiling, enormous, lips laughing, teary-eyed, happy because in only half an hour’s travel through this low city … But she does not occupy any of the blocks of its grid; none is marked by having her inside it. I’d have to subjugate myself to the pressurization of an airplane, dragging my feet along the pavement toward its steel flanks. Cuernavaca is far away. There’s no sea in Cuernavaca, I’ve checked on the map. Only green and brown on the paper, an abhorrent place the Writer never heard of, about which he never wrote, though about Los Angeles, yes, I’m sure.)