Omar would have had to be really stupid not to realize by this stage that I had something up my sleeve, something very specific. And he wasn’t stupid at all; he was very intelligent. He had to be, supremely: he was the measure of my intelligence. In the end, he resigned himself:
“I caught an eight-hundred-year-old fish.”
“I caught its grandfather.”
Omar clicked his tongue with infinite scorn. I wasn’t especially proud of the idea myself: it was an unfortunate attempt to play a practical joke on my friend by recycling a gag I’d read in a magazine, which must have gone something like this: “Two fishermen, inveterate liars, are talking about the day’s catch: ‘I caught a marlin this big.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that was the newborn baby. I caught its mother.’ ” What a flat joke! I worked so hard to set it up, and for such a paltry result! What did I ever see in it? Nothing but the power of the word. The joke contained, in a nutshell, both our number game (the lying fishermen could go on increasing the dimensions of the fish ad libitum) and that which transcended it: a word (like “mom,” or “dad,” or “grandfather”) triumphed over the whole series of numbers by placing itself on a different level.
So that’s what I was referring to. That was the game’s limit, its splendor and its misery.
Until we discovered the existence of that word. This, I repeat, did not occur at a particular moment in the game’s history. It happened at the beginning — it was the beginning.
The word was “infinity.” Logical, isn’t it? Perhaps even blindingly obvious? In fact, it has been a strain for me to call it the “number game,” when it was really the “infinity game,” which is how I’ve always thought of it. If I had to transcribe the archetypal session, the original, the matrix, it would be simply this:
“One.”
“Infinity.”
Everything else sprang from that. How could it have been otherwise? Why would we have denied ourselves that leap when every other kind of leap was allowed? In fact, it was the other way around: all the leaps that we allowed ourselves were based on the leap into the heterogeneous world of words.
From this point on, we can, I think, begin to glimpse an answer to the question that has been building subliminally since I began to describe the game: when did the sessions come to an end? Who was the winner? It’s not enough to say: Never, no one. I’ve given the impression that neither of us ever fell into the traps that we were continually laying for each other. That’s true in the abstract, in the myth that was ritually expressed by the various series, but it can’t always have been the case in the actual playing of the game. To be honest, I can’t remember.
I feel I can remember it all, as if I were hallucinating (otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this), but I have to admit that there are things I don’t remember. And if I were to be absolutely frank, I would have to say I don’t remember anything. An escalation, once again. But there’s no contradiction. In fact, the only thing I remember with the real microscopic clarity you need in order to write is the forgetting.
So:
“Infinity.”
Infinity is the limit of all numbers, the invisible limit. As I said, with the big numbers we were thinking blind, beyond intuition; but infinity is the transition to the blindness of blindness, something like the negation of negation. And that’s where the real visibility of my forgotten memory begins. Do I actually know what infinity means? It’s all I can know, but I can’t know it.
There’s something wonderfully practical about leaping to the infinite, the sooner the better. It thwarts every kind of patience. There’s no point waiting for it. I loved it blindly. It was the sunny day of our childhood. That’s why we never wondered what it meant, not once. Because it was the infinite, the leap had already happened.
Our refusal to think it through had a number of consequences. We knew that it didn’t make sense to talk about “half an infinity,” because in the realm of the infinite the parts are equal to the whole (half of infinity, the series of even numbers, say, is just as infinite as the other half, or the whole). But, returning surreptitiously to healthy common sense, we accepted that two infinities were bigger than one.
“Two infinities.”
“Two hundred and thirty million infinities.”
“Seven quintillion infinities.”
“Seven thousand billion billion quintillion infinities.”
“A hundred thousand billion billion trillion quintillion infinities.”
And so we continued until the word made its triumphant return:
“Infinity infinities.”
This formula could, in turn, be included in a series of the same kind:
“Ten billion infinity infinities.”
“Eight thousand billion trillion quadrillion quintillion infinity infinities.”
We didn’t pronounce these words, of course. I should make it clear that in general we didn’t actually articulate all the little series that I’ve been transcribing here; neither these particular ones nor others of the same kind. I’ve set it out in this long-winded way to make myself clear, but it wasn’t our intention to labor the obvious; on the contrary. All these series, and in fact all the series that might have occurred to us, were virtual. It would have been boring to say them. We weren’t prepared to waste our precious childhood hours on bureaucratic tasks like that; and, above all, it would have been pointless, because each term was surpassed and annihilated by the next. Numbers have that banal quality, like examples: they’re interchangeable. What matters is something else. Stripping away all the stupid and bothersome foliage of examples, what we should have said was:
“A number.”
“A number bigger than that.”
“A number bigger than that.”
“A number bigger than that.”
Although, of course, if we’d done that, it wouldn’t have been a game.
The word returned once more:
“Infinity infinity infinities.”
Only one number was bigger than that:
“Infinity infinity infinity infinities.”
I mean: that was the smallest bigger number, not the only one, because the series of infinities could be extended indefinitely. And so we ended up repeating the word over and over in a typically childish way, at the top of our voices, as if it were a tongue-twister.
“Infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinities.”
There was, believe it or not, an even bigger number: the number that one of us would say next. It was pure virtuality, the state in relation to which the game deployed all its marvelous possibilities.
Amazingly, given our greediness, it never occurred to us to add the name of a thing to the numbers. Bare like that, the numbers were nothing, and we wanted everything. There’s no real contradiction between the two half-wild children I’ve been describing, in a society that seems archaic and primitive today, and the fact that we were greedy. We wanted everything, including Rolls-Royces and objects that would have been no use to us, like diamonds and subatomic particle accelerators. We wanted them so badly! With an almost anguished longing. But there’s no contradiction. The supernatural frugality of our parents’ lives had apparently achieved its goal, and perhaps that goal was us. They were still using the furniture they’d bought when they got married; the rent was fixed; cars lasted forever; and the mania for household appliances would take decades to reach Pringles. .