It’s true, he was not my only friend nor my only conversational partner. He was one among many — I did not value him above the others. But it would be a loss that would go beyond the unit he represented. In my relationships with my friends, I have noticed — and I think this must be a universal phenomenon — that each one is regulated by a distinct line of interests, a distinct tone of friendship, even a different language. Friends are not interchangeable, even when the degree of friendship is the same and the level of culture and social standing is equivalent. There are unspoken understandings and agreements and codes that are built up over time and that make each one irreplaceable. But the loss, as I said, would go beyond what was unique. The conversations from which I derive so much pleasure form a system, and the disappearance of that “vein” of topics or shared opinions with this friend would create an imbalance, and this in turn would lead to the collapse of the entire network.
Nevertheless, beneath these fears, a doubt remained, the same one that had led to my initial surprise: Was this possible? Wasn’t it a bit excessive? The contrast between my educated and civilized friend and the ignorance of a person thus impaired was almost supernatural. Shouldn’t he be above such suspicions? Had he not given me sufficient proof, throughout the years, of his intelligence and perceptiveness? I had lost count of the number of times we had discussed, as equals, philosophers and artists and social and historical phenomena. My trust in his responses never flagged. And I was not under some kind of illusion, of this I could be certain, for I had submitted each conversation to the nocturnal test of memory, and I had scrutinized every last crease. During these reconstructions, I even scrutinized what had not been said. This discovery, if that is what it was, would be like suddenly discovering, after years of a relationship, that a friend had only one arm, or not even, because a one-armed man can hide his handicap with a prosthetic arm; to refine the simile, it would be more like a man discovering, while celebrating his silver wedding anniversary, that his wife was Chinese. Was that possible? Unfortunately, I had to respond in the affirmative. It was possible. In this case, evidence didn’t help; the strength of the unexpected destroyed it.
Nor did it help me to consider this as one of those blanks we all have in our education and that are sometimes as scandalous and as shocking as the one I was confronting at this moment. It had happened to me before, that I believed I knew something without knowing it because as a child I had adopted an erroneous idea about it, which worked well enough to never have felt the need to revise it or put it to the test. Due to extremely long concatenations of happenstance, one might never come across certain subjects, even when in possession of an alert mind and universal curiosity. This is possible because there are so many. Sometimes it is a question of pure laziness. For example, I know that there is an explanation for the fact that stagecoach wheels in Westerns appear to be turning backwards when the vehicle is moving quickly forward; I have even seen it written up and illustrated with diagrams, but I never bothered finding out about it in more detail. To have one of these gaps of comprehension or information is the most common thing in the world; however, this didn’t do me any good here, because the difference between fiction and reality was not an isolated issue that could reside in a blind spot; it was instead an oil spill, which spread over everything, even over what surrounded everything.
Someone less generous or more aggressive might have been pleased to discover that a friend of his was stupid. It would make him feel superior, safe in his narcissistic integrity, more intelligent than he thought: in a word, the winner. This was not the case for me. I felt depressed and distressed, like someone on the verge of losing something of great value. In reality, that feeling lasted a few seconds, the time that elapsed between one remark and another in an animated dialogue. In bed at night, I wondered: can depression last a few seconds? Apparently, this was not a true depression but rather its conceptual nucleus, suitable to expand upon in memory, and I tried, almost as if it were a game, to do so in order to delight in its contemplation. As my memory already knew that there was no reason to be depressed, I did so in “fictional” mode, establishing a bridge between the subject and its development.
As I said, my friend’s reply was unexpected; he had been champing at the bit and bringing to bear all his patience so as not to interrupt me. He showed no sign of lack of comprehension or confusion; on the contrary: he was determined to free me from my error.
He started by saying something that I took as a somewhat marginal generalization. According to him, actor and character could coexist, and the movie we had both watched proved this; if I had really watched it, he added with a touch of sarcasm, because the scope of my error made him doubt that I had. In order for them to coexist, neither a suspension of skepticism nor any other psychological or metaphysical operation was necessary, as I had proposed in my ravings, but only a bit of ingenuity. Ingenuity in invention, occupational ingenuity, perhaps not a lot, only the usual for this kind of artistic-
commercial production; he was not sufficiently familiar with what was currently going on in Hollywood to evaluate what we had seen: it could be a product off the movie assembly line, no different from the hundred or thousand others churned out each year by the dream factory, or it could be a movie that just happened to turn out really good.
On the same subject, he made a digression in order to explain that he did not feel comfortable in the discussion on which we had embarked. His mind, trained in philosophy, could be applied only with violent effort to a subject as banal as Hollywood fluff. He did not know the codes of what came under the heading “mass entertainment,” and he feared he would commit errors of evaluation, not only of the quality, as he had mentioned earlier, but even of the meaning itself. At the same time, he admitted that no object was too small for an inquisitive mind.
I agreed, and when I remembered the words I used to tell him so, I also remembered, in a blinding flash, my years of practice in conversation, which was a grand object, capacious enough to hold cultural profundities, yet also small and minimal in its parts and in the parts of its parts: everything, the small and the large, had been bathed in the same impartial light of repetition.
He warned me that he would have to make certain assumptions, some of them quite risky.
Go ahead, I said.
In order for what we were doing to not seem like a dialogue of the deaf, he began, he would start with my ideas in the hope of getting me to see the flip side.
I had spoken of verisimilitude, right? In fact, I had based my argument on it. That it was not verisimilar for a humble mountain herdsman to be wearing a fancy Rolex. So, if ours had one, this would create a rupture in verisimilitude, and there my syllogism ended.
I thought that it wasn’t that simple, or at least I had made it not that simple because I had gone back to the root of the problem, but at that moment I didn’t feel like arguing (perhaps due to the residual effect of my super-brief depression), and I wanted to see where he was going, so I merely assented with a quick nod of impatience. Anyway, if we were perfectly frank, it was that simple.