“Now everyone knows, thanks to you, you dirty snitch.”
It was useless. There was no point talking. The irrefutable and the indisputable would go on intervening. Although it wasn’t exactly the case that talking was pointless. There was always a point to talk, because it was the only way to know what was happening. But it was pointless to go on talking, because by the time you knew what was happening, time had spun around, turned back on itself, applying its obverse to its reverse, and the contact between past and future events had created a mass of irresolvable paradoxes.
So there was a silence, punctuated by the monotonous tom-tom. And the silence confirmed the immobility of the characters. Which wasn’t absolute: they had not been petrified or frozen in a still image. Little tremors ran through their bodies; there were imperceptible changes of position, which didn’t alter the overall postures: weight was shifted from one leg to the other, shoulders moved forward or back a fraction of an inch, eyes blinked, breath went in and out between slightly parted lips, occasionally moistened by a tongue. The criminal’s right hand went on holding the knife, with the blade pressed against the cartoonist’s throat, while his outstretched left hand held the old comic book in front of his victim’s face. No one else would have been able to hold up his arms for so long, but living like a hunted animal had given him the strength it took. Each arm performed its function: the knife arm made the threat serious; the comic arm explained it and gave it meaning. One without the other would not have been enough to create the scene, which was a product of their coordination. As for the cartoonist, he kept still for obvious reasons, neck tense and stretched, eyes on the comic.
At a certain point, the light stopped fading, it too froze, in an ambiguous dimness. It had not changed markedly from the beginning of the scene to what appeared to be its end. The effect might have been psychological, the natural illusion of darkening produced by our habitual experience of dusk. But who’s to say that this episode was taking place in the evening? The source of that ambiguous light could have been the morning sun, its radiance dimmed by clouds, or filtered through shutters or venetian blinds, or it could just as well have been the moon, a full moon in a clear midnight sky. . And the lighting could also have resulted from a combination or succession of various hours of the day, or all of them. (Artificial light sources were out of the question, because of the blackout affecting the city.)
Apart from the men, the studio was lifeless. It would have been futile to look for a fly buzzing, or an ant crossing the floor, or a piece of paper stirring in a breeze, or a drop falling from a faucet, or a speck of dust dancing in the air. It was as if even the electrons had frozen in their orbits. Everything that had the capacity to move was concentrated in the two standing figures intertwined at the center. They really were at the geometrical center of that square room, and the empty space around them made it all the more obvious; the drawing board and the ergonomic stool had been knocked over in the struggle and fallen apart. The four walls, equidistant from the human figures, were entirely covered with shelves, and these were chock-full with comic books, of which only the slender spines were visible, pressed up against one another from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.
How had two such different beings come to be present in the same place at the same time?
Given the stillness of their deadlock, it would have been possible to cut them out (in three dimensions, of course), breaking their potentially violent embrace, and place the separate figures in other scenes: the criminal slitting or about to slit the throat of one of his many victims, a defenseless woman, for example; the cartoonist horrified to see that a bad printing job had spoiled a work that he had spent months bringing to perfection. No changes or adjustments would have been necessary: the same posture and gestures, the same facial expression, could work in any number of different situations, and work so well that nobody would ever know.
Eventually, the top halves of both figures, from the waist up, began to lean forward simultaneously. The relative positions of the arms and heads remained the same, although the faces took on a gray luminosity. The leaning slowed to the point where it was imperceptible to the eye; but after a certain lapse of time it was clear that their faces were now a little closer to the floor. It was as if they were leaning down to look for something at their feet, both at the same time. But it was also as if they were suffering from material fatigue, and the hinges or joints in their waists were loosening.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
The Infinite
AS A KID I PLAYED some extremely strange games. They sound made up when I explain them, and I did, in fact, make them up myself, but many years ago, when I was still in the process of becoming the self that I am today. I made them up, or else my friends at the time did: it comes to the same thing because those kids contributed to the accumulation that resulted in me. The reason I’ve set out to describe the games and give a written account of them is that people have told me on more than one occasion that they really should be recorded, so that if I die tomorrow, the ideas won’t be lost forever. I’m not so sure of their uniqueness. Children are always coming up with the craziest things, but the repertoire is not infinite. Relying on my intuition and the law of probabilities, I’d be prepared to bet that the same or similar ideas have occurred to other children, at some point, somewhere. If that is the case, and a copy of this publication falls into the hands of a reader who was one of those children, these descriptions will serve as a reminder, and perhaps a resurrection, of a forgotten past. It will, I think, be necessary to go into some fairly complicated details, and this may lead to excessive technicality, but I’m undertaking this task in the hope of discovering what my childhood had in common with other distant, unknown childhoods, and since the shared element is bound to be something small, a fine point, and I don’t know which small thing it is, which detail in particular, I have no choice but to set them all out. There’s also a more practical reason, which relates to comprehensibility: even the most insignificant details are important for the complete explanation of mechanisms that might, at first glance, seem absurd. One has to work through the list of senseless oddities so as not to miss the one that has the magic power to make sense of everything.
I will begin with a mathematical or pseudomathematical game for two players, which consisted simply of naming a bigger number than the one just named by your opponent. If one player said “four” the other had to say “five” (or more: he could also say “a thousand”) in order to stay ahead, and so it went. Basically, that was the essence of the game; as you can see, it was extremely simple. Obviously, given the ordered sequence of numbers, to win you had to avoid the mistake of naming a number smaller than the one that had just been named. . But it’s also obvious that victory by default would be accidental in such a game and would not affect its essence. The winner was, essentially, the one who came up with a number so big that the other player couldn’t find a bigger one. We respected this principle: we never made mistakes, and if one of us had slipped up, the other would have been more than prepared to ignore it and keep going. So it’s hard to imagine how the game could ever have played itself out fully. There seems to be a contradiction in the fundamental idea. But I think all the difficulty springs from adopting an adult perspective, trying to understand the theory of the game and reconstruct a session of play. For us it wasn’t hard to understand; on the contrary, it was almost too easy (that’s why we complicated it a bit). The difficulties, which in any case we found amusing and absorbing, were on another level, as I will try to show. The game itself seemed perfectly natural to us.