Three times a day his landlady puts a plate of food in front of him without saying a word; if he happens to be asleep, she puts the plate on his bedside table. They barely speak. Dru never tells her what he has seen in the telescope, just as her husband never told her, and it seems she has no interest in it. Dru watches the opening and closing of the great, fantastical flowers of creeping plants that grow around the houses; he watches tournaments in vast arenas, naval battles, azure geysers spurting from the floors of apartments and their transformation each night into clear ice that reflects the light of the moon and the stars.
He knows that it takes a ray of light thousands of years to reach Earth, that all the beings he watches are long dead, yet still it seems to him that he lives among the Umurians. Sometimes he replies to questions he reads from their lips — questions that were asked of someone else and spoken many thousands of years ago. He calls out in Umurian to the solitary night-time walker to take care, having seen slinking up behind him one of the panthers that live in the wild gardens of the rooftops and at night climb down the tangled creepers into the streets, although he knows full well that thousands of years have passed since the moment the panther bit into the foolhardy pedestrian’s neck. The stargazer’s widow is a frequent witness to Dru’s shouted utterances in a language that bears no relation to Earth speech as he stares into the eyepiece. But never does she comment, never does she ask any questions. She remains silent when he turns his attention to her, perhaps with the intention of thanking her for a meal, when a strange language issues from his mouth and he struggles to recall the words of his own planet. Perhaps she lived through this with her husband; perhaps he, too, spoke in the same unknown language; perhaps she thinks that the instrument to which the two men have sacrificed so many nights is an invention of the devil, a bringer of madness and death; perhaps she thinks this is man’s business, and that she has no right to interfere in it.
Dru sleeps during the day, and when he wakes in the afternoon he waits with impatience for night to fall. He sits in his room in a low chair, watching through the window the outlines of the bald branches of the garden; he contemplates the white walls of the room and their pictures of a glorious distant planet, which appears to be living through the later years of a golden age (there are obvious indications of imminent decline). Sometimes the face of Isili comes to him as in an obscure dream, or scenes from his life at the court of Vauz, or from the hotels and wayside inns of his days as a wanderer. By this time Dru’s thoughts are in the language of the Umurians. The face of his landlady — the only human face he ever gets to see — appears to him monstrous, stirring his compassion. One day he catches sight of his own reflection in the hallway mirror and is horrified to see that he, too, has a ghostlike white mask instead of a face of gleaming gold. He covers the mirror with a piece of cloth, and his landlady is willing to leave it like this.
Having forgotten Isili, Dru falls in love with a girl from Umur. Nus has a face of dark gold set with diamonds. There he sits at the telescope, unkempt, unshaven and unwashed, whispering Umurian words of love to Nus, watching her travel about the city. When she falls in love with a young panther-hunter, he feels a dark despair; such is his torment as he looks into her bedroom and follows their night-time games of love, that he wishes he would die. Sometimes he has the impression that the lovers know about him and are laughing at him. Sometimes he thinks Nus might be looking — in provocation and derision — in the direction of the distant telescope and Earth, straight into the eyepiece of Dru the cosmic voyeur; when this happens he flies into a rage, cries out and kicks the telescope, curses Nus of Umur and threatens her with a dreadful revenge. But Nus, of course, has been dead for several thousand years.
Fo’s return
The plot of the novel written by Fo in the cabin in the woods is gradually shifted to the other planet. Dru, erstwhile king of Vauz, comes into the story less and less, until he features only in connection with the description of scenes from the telescope. Now events are described to which Dru’s telescope does not have access, events which he is surely imagining. Also described are the feelings and thoughts of the extra-terrestrials, whom Dru learns to read better and better from their facial expressions, gestures and words. And so the extra-terrestrial passages, which to begin with were somewhat reminiscent of the nouveau roman, gradually assume the nature of a traditional, omniscient author. (But the right to get right into a particular space or the thoughts of a character, which the authors of the nineteenth century considered theirs for the taking, is in this case paid for by Dru’s agonized solving of clues as his gaze wanders about the dumb surface of objects and faces, a surface that remains resolutely closed to him.)
And as visible worlds grow out of invisible worlds and carry their hidden spaces and secrets within, as what is close to the surface illumines depths, backs and interiors, the world in which Dru lives has from the very beginning its own depth, in which there are very few gaps. Because of this Dru is all the more exasperated when he comes up against a genuine blind spot. For example, the main square of the capital city is entered by a mighty river, screened from view at a certain point by the city hall; the river does not re-emerge on the far side of this building. Dru’s gaze is well-trained in looking for clues of the hidden, and he studies carefully the reflections flickering across the smooth sides of sleighs that emerge from behind the city hall. But the sleighs move too quickly and the reflections on their warped surfaces are too misshapen to read. Once mirrored in a metal tray carried by a waiter in a restaurant at the back of the square, he sees something pulsating, which may be natural or may be mechanical; after this his gaze follows the waiters of this establishment for several nights, but never again do they hold their trays at the correct angle.
By this time only one sentence in every hundred pages reminds the reader of the eye resting against the eyepiece to observe a planet in a distant galaxy; now the people of Earth are figures from a strange planet. Then at last the eye disappears from the text entirely — in his cabin, Fo forgets all about it, and the novel becomes a saga of Umur. The gaze is free of the constraints imposed by the eyepiece and able to travel about Umur at will; all coverings are demolished, objects are no longer made up of fronts and backs, surfaces and insides. The gaze that sweeps the planet, sniffs into hollows and joyfully orbits objects like a dog, belongs to no one in particular; its drunken course leaves in its wake a continuous trail of words. A life form appears on the square behind the city hall that is half-plant, half-mountain, that drinks in the water of the river and transforms this water into translucent, coloured crystals that travel through steep caves into glowing underwater lakes. The pressure of gases in the lakes occasionally throws these crystals high above the Umurian city like magnificent fireworks. The gaze follows Nus into rooms in the most secret depths of her house, pushes through walls and curtains, walks about with her in a vast gold cellar Dru never knew existed.
The tale of Dru’s wanderings and the description of how — once in his new world — he forgets about Isili entirely, is no doubt an echo of Fo’s own fate. Mii’s face has disappeared entirely from Fo’s thoughts, but it returns unrecognized in the masks of his characters. The similarity between Fo’s story and the story of his heroes is so great that the unknown author of this part of the Book—perhaps Fo himself in the cabin — several times confuses Mii with Isili and inserts the wrong name. (“If you wish to find something exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.”) It might be expected that Fo’s projecting his own trauma in his work would be a kind of therapy for him, allowing him to exorcize the demons of despair and restlessness. I was imagining that once his imagination had given his demons new bodies, he would find the courage to drive them from his thoughts; but in fact all that happens is that the demons gain new nourishment, which makes them stronger and more aggressive. They control the world of Fo’s novel just as earlier they controlled the world of Fo’s real life; they unify both these regions under their rule, and in this new empire they begin to flaunt the rituals of their power.