incomprehensible, and that’s why children are so fond of the word, which holds the promise of an object to be opened and entered into. They live, provisionally, in that correspondence. With the imaginative flexibility particular to her age, the girl entered the museum and walked through its rooms, among the works of contemporary art, those supremely strange works that, for the uninitiated, belong to the realm of the incomprehensible. Arbitrary objects and excessive complications reversed themselves for the benefit of innocence. But the almost transparent paper of the napkin from which the museum was made was so flimsy, and the tensions that held it all in place were so delicately balanced that it was already coming apart under the clumsy pressure of the girl’s little fingers, and the renowned curved surfaces were flexing with a pliability that no architect, least of all Frank Gehry, would have been able to foresee. Folding, enfolding, and unfolding were all gathered into the abstraction of a geometrical point. And at that point a question arose spontaneously: how could it be that the set of customers who happened to have come to one of the multitudinous cafés scattered around the city at that hour of the afternoon included so many people who had so thoroughly mastered the art of paper folding? Was it an almost miraculous coincidence? A gratuitous conspiracy? A moment’s inspiration? But folding paper into recognizable shapes is not a skill that requires long study, or travel to the Far East for classes with a master. It would have been more surprising to find that among the customers sitting in a café at a certain time, there were twenty podiatrists or sociolinguists, sitting on their own or in pairs or little groups at each table, who didn’t know each other and had come to the café at that time for twenty different reasons—that would have been truly jaw-dropping. Up to a point, figurative paper-folding is a natural and spontaneous activity, but only up to a point: the starting point, that is, the making of little boats or planes. And yet, because of the natural tendency to elaborate and the spare time that, in retrospect, we generally turn out to have had, in this case the idle pastime had given rise to escalating transformations. And that was precisely where the solution began to emerge. The question at issue could not, in fact, be answered by comparing or juxtaposing paper-folding with other activities, or considering fortuitous groupings of things or people. The answer lay in the reason for the activity of folding, which was originally to fold the spatiotemporal coordinates in which coincidences occurred. These coincidences gave rise to many misunderstandings and arguments, which were never resolved. Were they coincidences or were they reality? Here, two incompatible modes of thought — statistical and historical — entered into conflict. Representative figures made by folding paper must have first appeared when someone discovered that a sheet of paper cannot, however hard one tries, be folded in half more than nine times, no matter how large or thin the sheet is. Faced with this limit, what had been simply a piece of folded paper flowered into something that resembled a piece of the world. The work of folding, in other words, bounced off the wall of the incomprehensible and opened into the figurative. The discovery of the ninefold limit had taken place in the legendary time of origins. The Dawn of Humanity, it must have been, since the limit was a mathematical absolute. But it turned out that paper had been invented at a relatively late stage in History, before which it was already impossible to fold a sheet of paper more than nine times, although there was no paper. What this meant for Humanity was that the ingenious and amusing figures achieved by folding were, as they say, “within everyone’s reach.” Doubt once dispelled, the series continued and soared away from the simple and the clichéd. And so it was that the next gift, which the little girl received from a short man with an impressive quiff of black hair combed back and held in place with brilliantine, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a beer, realized the possibilities of a little paper napkin in the most elaborate way. It was a boat, not a schematic representation like the first gift, but an elegant sailing ship decked with flags, and the folding continued out from the keel to show the wavy water of a river and the banks on either side, and houses on the banks, and stores, a church, gardens, and people crowding the streets along the waterfront, waving to the passing ship. On board, the crew was busy working the sails, while the passengers admired the view and waved back to the locals. The group of passengers, who were obviously important people, in eighteenth-century attire (wigs, ermine stoles, braid), was dominated by the majestic, rotund figure of a queen, disproportionately large and clearly in command. Standing slightly apart from the group, and just as prominent as the queen, was a handsome, prepossessing man in full military regalia, with a plumed hat, a fur cape, and a sword hanging from his belt. An almost microscopic fold of the tortured napkin used to construct this panorama showed that he had only one eye. That detail was enough to identify him and situate the scene, for this was, in fact, the depiction of a very particular historical event. In 1786, Potemkin, Prince of Tauris, favorite of Catherine the Great, completed the conquest and pacification of the Crimea, and in the spring of the following year, he arranged for the sovereign to visit the peninsula, as well as Ukraine, which had also been annexed to her empire. She traveled in grand style, with all the court and the diplomatic corps, and hundreds of servants, cooks, musicians, and actors, plus a portable theater and salons, libraries, and pets. Each stage of the journey was celebrated with magnificent parties held at castles along the way, attended by the local aristocrats and dignitaries. Coaches, berlins, carts, and sleds were left in Kiev, and the voyage continued over the water: eighty luxuriously fitted-out ships set off on the Dnieper, and this was the moment that had been captured by the napkin: the tsarina in the flagship, surrounded by the ambassadors of all the European powers, and Potemkin at the prow, making sure that the grand spectacle that he had orchestrated was going according to plan. (He had lost an eye in a brawl with the brothers Ostrov, who were also among Catherine’s lovers.) It was all his creation: the prosperous cities they could see on the riverbanks, thrown up overnight to be displayed to the visitors; the plump, multitudinous cattle, brought in specially; the contented peasants cheering the tsarina, in reality a corps of carefully instructed extras. In the diplomatic reports that were later sent to various courts, it was clear that none of the ambassadors were entirely convinced by this playacting, but all admired the industry of the favorite who, in a few short months, had mocked up an entire country from scratch. The leap from the legendary tsarina to the delightful little girl had traversed every kind of representation. The minuscule diorama, treated with a regal indifference, began to unfold as soon as she touched it, and by the time she reached her mother’s table, after making all manner of unnecessary detours and digressions with her new treasure on display, the destruction was almost complete: the queen was sinking into the waves of the river; the courtiers and ambassadors were collapsing onto each other in an involuntary orgy; Potemkin was on top of a church tower, standing on his head; and the ship looked like a bicycle. The ruin, reverting to the condition of a crumpled napkin, sank in a puddle of Coca-Cola, and the little girl ran to the other end of the café. A bespectacled youth had set aside his laptop for a moment to join in the folding game, and was offering her a paper version of Rodin’s Thinker (if the almost impalpable material of the cheap napkins in those metal dispensers can be dignified with the name of paper). She greeted it with her indiscriminate trilling and laughter, although, for a child of her age, it was hardly an appropriate toy. It was probably the only thing that the youth had learned how to make by folding paper. Or perhaps he had once made other things, but this was the one that had turned out best, and from then on he had specialized. Or perhaps, as his use of a computer suggested, he was committed to going paperless and saving the planet’s forests. If he’d made an exception in this case, it was because he wanted to take part in the competition along with all the others and not be left behind; to insist on saving a tiny napkin made of the lightest paper would clearly have been a symptom of the fanatical rigidity that discredits a good cause. But there was something else, which had to do, precisely, with The Thinker. The only paper-saving that made sense was the kind that depended on mental work, on concentration (so finely represented by Rodin’s masterpiece), which enabled a thinker to skip the intermediate steps, and thus avoid the need to waste reams of paper on those rough drafts, the works of the philosophers. The girl was a stranger to philosophies and concentration, and all she could recognize was a human figure, which she cradled in her arms, singing a simplified lullaby. The customers smiled as she went past their tables, and there was perhaps — or almost certainly — an element of vindictive pleasure in the smiles of those who had inwardly condemned the gift as inappropriate, a form of cultural showing-off quite out of place in that context. The next object the little girl received (folded by a priest in a break from his conversation with two contractors about an extension to the parish soup kitchen) seemed to have been intended to contrast with the incongruous Thinker. It did this by signaling its origins in infantile zoology and storybook illustration, and its resemblance to a toy with moving parts. Using only the obligatory material (the little paper napkin), the priest, by means of ten cunning folds, had made a kangaroo. A mother kangaroo, with a joey’s head emerging from the ventral fold. Before handing it over, he gave the girl instructions, or just the one, which was very simple and required no words since it took the form of a practical demonstration: by pulling on the kangaroo’s long, curved tail, he made the joey’s head pop out of the pouch and pop back in again. It can’t have been the first time the priest’s white hand had tugged on a kangaroo’s tail. The little girl was charmed by the joey’s shy peeping, and ran off at once to show it to her mother. The priestly origin of this ingenious folding was lost along the way, as the fragile mechanism was destroyed by the girl’s clumsy jerks. But didn’t this gift allude to the higher Maternity and the Child who appeared and disappeared at the miraculous edges of the world? That priest had practiced with communion wafers, so similar to the napkins in their texture and fineness. No one really knows what a wafer looks like before the ceremony in which it plays the leading role. The origins of the host are surrounded by a multitude of legends. For example, the legend of the tenth fold. There was no time to repair the tail-lever because the girl’s mother was already standing up, along with her friend, and looking around, not realizing at first that her daughter was right there beside her, then taking her by the hand to go. Suddenly she was in a big rush: there’d been so much to say, they’d talked so long; time had flown, and the hairdresser was about to close. At the last minute the little girl let go of her mother’s hand and ran a few steps to take something that was being held out to her. Her mother called her impatiently, holding the door open, and it was only when they were out on the sidewalk that she saw what her daughter was holding: a polyhedron made by folding a little paper napkin.