Were I to hold fast to this event, I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise than retrace quite literally the beginning of that very game. But what for, if I can simply refer to it? Very well. –
Nevertheless. .: The stranger, even if he was utterly human at the outset, didn’t, in fact, seem a stranger completely: through the likeness of the Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, or rather beneath it somehow, I just now recognized Fuld. But against expectations this discovery did not excite me in the least. The bizarre reality that Vicente Escudero was Fuld, while nevertheless remaining Vicente Escudero, was a matter of such indifference to me that I undertook nothing to identify him further — with my ears, say — except with my perhaps faulty eyesight. I did nothing to move him to speak, not even a single word. Here I was as though before something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, despite my being utterly secure in knowing that this was Fuld, when a three-note motif suddenly inserted itself between us. Yes, three notes, which you could hear — it might not have been possible to say where from — and which, once they’d subsided, nevertheless carried on, this time somehow objectively. I can’t say it any other way than this: they carried on in the manner of a monkey wrench operating on large threads, a wrench that had been inserted between my fellow traveler and me, and now promptly extended itself, parting us irresistibly, one from the other. I turned in on myself noticeably, enough so that I was, at length, alone in an oppressive, yet light mist. Then the three-note motif rang out again, but this time with an emphasis that announced that something was beginning. At the same time, it sounded like a warning that it would be recorded as an injustice on my part if I were not to recognize it, this motif, but this warning was superfluous, for the very reason I had come was for this passing scrap of rondo from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and to sit at my own table. I would say I recognized that I was still sitting at my own table were it not for the hazy impression that between “before” and “now” a sort of fissure had inserted itself, one that I seemed to have slept through, though I was now back on its trail. I say “slept through,” although I rather recollect something along the lines of a submersion, from which I am surfacing again — more than sleep. Memories of spicy yet thin air, and wafting within it but a hint of some amusing realness (the sort of thing that clings to the variegated decorations of national operas), and with which I am ultimately finding myself again, for within it sinks that now familiar, double, good-naturedly mocking travesty of Grock’s posture recalling his partner, which I am just now caressing with my still-blinking eyes, left right left right, as I surface.
Their sideways smiles say symmetrically, from that side: “We’re indivisible!”
From this: “We’re bound together!”
These smiles, because they’re sidelong, intersect right in front of my face. There they ignite a hotpoint: admittedly, I find it scintillating, but I see past it. Behind it, there’s a strange hand; it is sparingly twisting a doll that some other hand is toying with; I surmise that that playful hand belongs to me. The doll has fallen out of it; there’s a thump, as from under some heavy object, a Browning, let’s say, and just then I also hear: “Are you just going to keep playing forever, then? A person might say you’re dodging the bill that way.”
I rolled a glance across his visage, it wound around to her face and rolled across it as well. And again that peevish unease: Who is this third, this third, from their common likeness? The road leads there, but it’s blocked; in this bare blockade wall, however, there’s a crack, and through this crack dribbles a sort of meager certainty that between those two, Fuld and Giggles, there is a mysterious, yet definite, relationship. Yes, the man-stranger and the woman-stranger are Fuld and Giggles, but they are Fuld and Giggles, as it were, across mountains, across rivers. It’s them, through unheard-of forms. Now there can no longer be any doubt. He, having smiled, twisted his head: this sweet-toothed grimace that someone has inexpressibly, but importunately and quite vainly attempted to finish into an austere smile!
“Escudero!” say I.
He: “Escudero!”
But barely had he said it than he turned to face me and drew up so close that there could be no mistaking his intention to let it be understood that what would now occur would be — as I would say — utterly exceptional, for my sake, for me, as a sort of honor: and it was off with the mask. But with the locution “off with the mask” I’m not capturing the nature of what happened. For the change that came about was not, verily, as though he had tossed aside his mask or put on another; on the contrary, the new face that replaced the preceding one showed up with the same somehow swift accrual by which living-room magicians exchange their various neckties. Actually, it was more complicated: a whole array of visages were exchanged on his face (if one must put it this way), but so swiftly that I couldn’t manage to identify any one of them but the last; they flipped by no differently from pages of a block calendar quickly thumbed through, and in that nimble turning of the pages/faces dwelled, motionless, a pair of fixed, burning, almost inquisitorial eyes, somehow as if they were gradually burning through the top layer of those contemplated pages. But heavy lids suddenly fell upon those eyes, and the hard-braked contemplation blew over into a face that was so calm, so collected. .
But the fact that I was face-to-face with myself was not the eeriest thing; eerier still was the ardor with which my thought was trying to persuade my hesitating senses that this was no delusion; eerier still was the certainty that my senses— at just this moment my sight — had begun to live outside of my thought. What’s with them! They were looking to make a break for it, they were devising a way to explain away, that is to say refute, what was evident. But thought, like a gloomily overjoyed sheepdog, drove them back to the flock, and having discharged the time-honored office of bringer-of-reason, it persuaded them that they were deceiving themselves while believing the deceit, and it increased the panic.
I looked around for the woman, but she was deliberately turning her head away and tapping on the table. And, God knows how, that indifferent bearing of hers expressed a command so definite, so imperious and uncompromising, that my eyes again turned to the place they’d only just cowered from like worn-out, terror-hunched dogs, toward the eyes of that one whose collapsed eyelids were more bewitching and more sighted than the most fevered pupils. We were again facing each other — I and I — so closely that the waves of embarrassment got the better of my fear and led me toward an unwitting, overfamiliar gesture: I passed my hand across my face, but hardly had I done so than I was on my feet. Not my hand’s sense of touch — for it did not remember that touch would have prompted it toward that suspicion — not my hand’s sense of touch, but it was somehow another of its senses that caused alarm.
I was on my feet, a step before the tall mirror over the fireplace — I say before the tall mirror over the fireplace, knowing with sun-like clarity that I’m in front of the mirror— which, however, didn’t respond to me. And again: eerier than this betrayal of me — who, despite an unspoken but age-old pact, did not issue forth from those depths — was my ardent, gloomily high-spirited thought trying to persuade my startled senses not to be afraid, not to run away, that there was nothing to worry about, that this empty mirror was a correct mirror, that this was how it had to be.
Did I cry out? I don’t know, but how else, except as a cry, could that sudden thaw work its way out, as copious and roiling as the fear that preceded it had been miserly and desiccated? I was standing before the mirror, I knew that the mirror I was standing in front of was eerily parched, yet I sank my gaze into its extinct waters just as assuredly as a fisherman, before the appearance of the auspicious full moon, plunges his nets into the teeming waters. All I did was point a plaintive, if unfearful, left hand at the unfaithful mirror, and I said: