I looked again at Amelina. Monumental transparent shapes in continual metamorphosis were rising from the water in the pool that separated us. I thought it was another Macuto Line, the one of dreams, the private. .
Suddenly, Amelina disappeared, the shapes melded into a horizontal wave, and the sun was once again shining in the sky. My shadow stretched out in front of me once again. . My shadow, in every swimming pool in the Andes.
I couldn’t help glancing up at the mountains in the vicinity of where I had left the cloning machine. That gesture had the virtue of returning me to reality. At least I could be sure that what was happening there was not a dream. No matter what strange paths my thoughts might take, the process would continue, independently of me, though subsequently I would take charge of it. That, however, would be a kind of epilogue; in itself, the Great Work consisted principally of me abstaining from all and every intervention, of achieving a parallel trajectory of absolute integrity.
VI
There is another coincidence on another leveclass="underline" that between the velocity of thought and thought itself. This is the same as saying that the Great Work — the creation of the individual — is exactly what is accomplished during a life span at that constant velocity. In a certain sense, velocity is the Great Work; confusion arises about the method. Thus, my Great Work, my secret labor, is highly personal, nontransferable, nobody but I could carry it out, because it consists of the innumerable psychic and physical instants whose sequence confirms my velocity. The velocity at which I unfold through time. By becoming an individual, my work allows me to love and be loved.
The aforesaid occurred to me while I was considering, with amazement, the quantity of things that were happening to me while nothing was happening. I noticed this as my pen was moving: there were thousands of tiny incidents, all full of meaning. I’ve had to pick and choose carefully, otherwise the list would be endless. But it’s normal for more things to happen when you’re traveling than during the normal course of habitual life. Not only because they actually happen because one is on the move and
actively going out looking for things, but because our perceptions awaken when we leave our habits behind, we see more and hear more, we even dream more. For someone who travels as little as I do, for someone who leads such a routine life, a trip can make an enormous difference; it is the objective equivalent of cerebral hyperactivity.
I am selecting, somewhat haphazardly, the facts I use to carry forward this story of the days I spent waiting while the cloning process was taking place at the top of the mountain, focusing exclusively on the translation possibilities. I should mention that the literary conference I had been invited to attend was taking place concurrently, but I was so detached from it I would not have been able to name even one of the subjects of its sessions and panel discussions. In one, however, I was a participant, and although this participation, fortunately, was passive and indirect, I had no choice but to know about it. It was a marginal activity, attendance optional, held outside the framework of the official sessions; it consisted of the staging of one of my plays by the University Theater Group of the Humanities Department. They had, apparently, already staged other plays of mine, and this time they had chosen one called In the Court of Adam and Eve. It was not the one I would have chosen, but I did not object when I saw it on the program they sent me months earlier. As soon as I arrived they asked me to attend the final rehearsals, approve the costumes and sets, meet the actors. . I politely declined. I wished to be merely another member of the audience. That last statement was made out of a sense of obligation, for I didn’t care whether I saw it or not, and if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have gone; but it turned out to be true. As far as their request that I speak to the cast about my motivation for writing it, firmer reasons accompanied my refusal. The first one, I considered it inadvisable to explain; the others had to do with the amount of time that had passed since I’d written it, and how totally I had forgotten it. We left it at that, and though they were probably disappointed, they did not seem offended.
Nevertheless, I did intervene on one point. The play would be performed for the general public in a newly built theater, but only those attending the conference would see the preview, and that performance could be held in a different venue, possibly in the open air, thereby taking full advantage of the climate. They asked my opinion, and in this case I felt I did have something to say. They expected me to come up with something unexpected and extravagant, so I chose the airport, which is right downtown because Mérida takes up the entire small valley in which it is situated. They liked that idea, got authorization, and made all the arrangements.
The play dates back to my Darwinian period, but it foreshadows my subsequent work with clones. Within the entire body of my work, it is an exception: I have an aversion to what is now called “intertextuality,” and I never make literary allusions in my novels or plays. I force myself to invent everything; when the only choice is to recycle something that already exists, I prefer to take recourse in reality. But I allowed myself this exception because Genesis is a special case, even if only for its title. If inventiveness, or the transmutation of reality, is part of a broader mechanism of literary genetics, Genesis could well be considered the master plan, at least among us Westerners.
Saying that this short play foreshadowed my subsequent scientific work is, to tell the truth, an understatement. The mere idea of Adam and Eve’s existence, of humanity (the species) retroactively reduced to a single couple, gives rise to genetics. I would even say that it is as far as the imagination can go in this field. Genetics is the genesis of diversity. But if diversity has nobody on whom to spread itself out, it turns on itself, gets tangled up in its own general particularity, and therein the imagination is born.
I remember how one critic, at the play’s debut many years ago, called it “a beautiful love story.” In retrospect, I have found in that play the key to my difficulty in speaking about love other than through complex translations of perspectives. The coincidence of Adam with Eve in a world where it was unnecessary to seek each other out through the exhaustive labyrinths of the real is one theory of love. The passage from Adam to Eve under the guise of the fable of the rib was simply cloning. Once both characters were in the scene, cloning collapsed, decisively. The level of the fable guaranteed it would belong to an inaccessible past, a past that could only be captured through the imagination or through fiction. I believe that this myth is what turned the past into a mental construct; if not for its intercession, today we would perhaps be dealing with the past as simply one more reality, like any other object of perception.