Letter to the Seer
In the grand tradition of the enlightened, I occupy, always, the last place. I’m not speaking in a chronological sense, but hierarchically: sleepiness, drowsiness, myopia fill my resumé. From Petronio’s frenetic maelstrom I have retained no more than a sentence: “A day is nothing: there is just time to become yourself, and then night is upon you.” In those conditions laziness is not so much a vice as an ontological subject. So then, what does a man see between two dreams, when he has not yet freed himself of the first to fall immediately into the second? He sees nothing. Because seeing, madam, is not a matter of contemplating, inert, the tireless passage of apparitions, but of seizing, from those apparitions, some meaning. In a word, the vertical work, like that of the ray, of the enlightened one, which you know and employ, or, really, that which employs you. For that reason I came to you saying that in the grand tradition of the enlightened, I, always, invisible, occupy the last place.
Sleepiness, drowsiness, myopia: and the hand, too, that, in this semidarkness, moves, errs, closing, opening, showing openly, easily, how it has grasped nothing. The greatness, the subspecies, related to sleepiness and the hand, is, you will have already guessed, darkness. The great black magnetic mass that drags our gestures downward, one by one. In that blackness, the world, I accomplish my designated task, clumsily, according to the rules. My muse, if I may call her that, is, if you like, a manual. The subtle mechanics of the ray, if, from time to time, it touches me, are useless among so much darkness.
So I send you nothing. Nothing to submit to your clairvoyance. The monotonous, dull universe has nothing to do with the monotonous, dull fragments in me. And if I speak now, this once, unmediated, in the first person, it is in order to demonstrate clearly that through me no otherness shall be manifest, nothing that is not in the fleeting stains; fugitive, intermittent, whose borders are invaded by darkness, and which we call the world. From this purblind letter, I ask you to draw no conclusion. Because a conclusion is always behind and is, in relation to its parts, an “other.” Now then, for a blind man there can certainly be otherness, unity, everything. A blind man enjoys his right to imagination. A myopic man should be modest: a mobile stain occupies the entirety of his reduced field of vision and annihilates, without malignancy, everything else. The blind man, as far as he is from the world, can, with a vertiginous imagination, grasp it. The myopic man is too close to the remaining fragments to escape, in a leap, his plain.
What can be expected, then, from a dozing man? Nothing more than a series of fragments, dense, uncut. Let the world shine in them, if one of the ways of the world is to shine.
Half-Erased
For Bernard le Gonidec
A harsh diagonal column of light comes in through the window and settles, on the wood floor, in a yellow circle inside of which a million pale particles wheel around, while the smoke of my cigarette, rising from the bed, enters it and slowly disperses, on this May morning, from which I can see, through the window, the blue sky: insomnia. I’ll get up in a while, take the clothes off of my brother’s empty bed, get dressed, go out into the street for my first cup of coffee at the galleria, smoking my third or fourth cigarette of the day, standing next to the counter, looking down the way, not speaking, not tasting either the coffee or the smoke, a man about thirty years old to those who see me from the outside, sometimes mistaken for my brother — someone will surely come along to greet me thinking I am him and not me, the one I know myself to be — and through the windows of the galleria I will see the sunlight falling onto the red metal tables in the practically empty patio: the workday. I contemplate — having overcome my bewilderment at being alive, still, and awake, again — the room being divided in two by this diagonal column of light, and I see the furniture, my own clothes, my brother’s empty bed, the light itself, the smoke: separation. At once, suddenly, rapidly, resonating even more intensely than my own silence and louder than my silence can bear, from what my mother calls the foyer, the phone rings. From afar, Héctor’s voice asks if I heard the explosions last night, and I use my voice for the first time today to say that the first explosion went off as Tomatis and I were standing in the doorway of the game room at the Progress club, and that when the second one went off we were playing truco and the cards on the table, on the green felt, were the ace against the king on top, and the jack against the knight below. Life imitates art, Héctor says, adding that he’ll come pick me up in half an hour to go see where the dynamite has opened breaches along the coast road. Standing on the sidewalk I see the car approaching in the sun, the cigarette between my lips and the smoke dissipating just above my face — standing on the piece of sidewalk that I have just been contemplating from the balcony, having hung up the phone and gotten dressed — into the air, sunny and windless, but cold. The car moves ahead among others like it, black, slow, and its chrome sparkles in the sun. It is just another particle of the monotonous noise generated, for some time, by the city, a particle of the tumult of staining and shifting that has begun to work early this morning. We go straight, slowly, stopping every minute among the cars that follow us and those that cross in front of us, and when we get to the central post office and the bus station, we turn onto the Avenida del Puerto and start speeding up, freeing ourselves from the cramped nucleus of the city, seeing the palm trees come toward us and then fall behind, grayed and fraying at the onset of winter. The car’s side windows are foggy. The hard light of the sun breaks at sharp right angles upon the trees and houses. The men walking along the sidewalks and others, working on the beach as longshoremen, are bathed, so to speak, in the cold light. Leaning forward, Héctor has taken out, from the glove compartment, a flask of cognac, offering me a sip. I have refused it. Still, he has given me the flask, covered in hard leather, so that, as he drives, I can unscrew the metal cap. The smell of alcohol floods my nose, even colder than the air I was just breathing on the sidewalk and that still scratches my nostrils. Beyond Héctor’s profile, raised in the act of drinking, even beyond the foggy glass, there is a white wall passing, recently painted, endless, and behind it I know there are men, at this very moment, making blocks of ice. The rough pavement makes the white image tremble in the dingy window. And suddenly, calmly, I remember a dream, as if someone had offered me a glimpse inside a barely open box, only to slam it shut just as I leaned in, just as I’ve begun to guess what’s inside. I don’t remember what the dream was about, just that I have had it. It seems to me that there was no white wall in it, no car, nor was Héctor in the dream, nor, moreover, did it take place on the Avenida del Puerto, and yet I remembered it, for a moment, when I looked, beyond the raised profile and beyond the dingy window, at the white wall. A policeman, cloaked and serious, refuses, at the suspension bridge, to let us pass. It seems it is uncertain whether or not the water, flooding up over the breaches, will block the road. Héctor takes a press pass from the glove compartment and hands it to the policeman, whose face, the color of wood, half hidden between the rim of his cap and the collar of his coat, peers through the window. At last we cross the bridge, heading onto the road, surrounded on either side, as far as the eye can see, by water: water, and sometimes, in the middle of a field, a farmhouse in ruins, of which we can just make out the roof and a bit of the walls; not even the tops of the trees; everything else is water, smooth and calm, level with the embankment. When we get to the first breach we stop the car and get out. The noise of the car doors opening, the sound of our voices and our shoes scraping against the asphalt strewn with rubble rings out and then fades. Héctor talks about science fiction. Then, as we are bent over the rubble watching the torrent flow — in what direction? — through the breach, where the two liquid plains join, almost soundlessly, he recalls Faulkner. Too much literature for a painter, I say. Héctor doesn’t answer me. He removes the flask from his bag and takes another sip of cognac, wrinkling his elastic face. I draw my dull gaze from the torrent at the depths of the breach to the two smooth expanses divided by the road. They tell me nothing. For the first few days I tried to feel bewilderment, even fear, pity for those who the water would sweep away, something, but I managed nothing. I see nothing but a smooth surface, almost placid, extending to the horizon from each edge of the road strewn with rubble, and it gives me no sign. The thing that really makes me shudder, says Héctor, is to think this idea we have that the water must, at some point, stop rising and begin to recede might be utterly wrong. In the middle of the street, the black car, its chrome sparkling in the sun, its doors open, looks as if it had been abandoned long ago. It looks, so to speak, dead. And we, the only moving things in this harsh, monotonous landscape, have also fallen still. A helicopter appears. It wheels over our heads a couple times before heading back toward the city, fading from view. The pilot must have seen us from above, two men dressed in black overcoats, in full sunlight, squatting amid the rubble, looking at the breach in the embankment, and the black car abandoned in the middle of the road, its chrome resplendent in the sun, its doors open. We turn around slowly, cautiously avoiding the water, and once we are pointed in the opposite direction we start heading back to the city. As we leave the bridge behind us and Héctor gives a friendly wave to the policeman who intercepted us on our way out, I see the helicopter passing over our heads again and heading toward the other side of the bridge, flying over the road in the direction of the breaches in the embankment. The delicate frame, red metal and glass, flies low, and I wonder what the pilot must see from above, apart from the breaches and the rubble and the blue strip of asphalt and the two liquid plains. All of that without us, without the black car, I mean, and then, as we begin to drive back along the Avenida del Puerto, Héctor tells me not to worry, that while the water continues to rise — and the radio bulletin, at precisely that moment, says that it is still rising, and will continue to rise — I can stay perfectly calm because, after all, in four days I will be in Paris. I know that he’s watching me intently, with no regard for the road, to see what effect his words have had on me — or at least I assume that if he is watching me so intently, it is for that reason — but I keep staring at the white wall through the dingy window. Really, his words have had no effect on me. I feel as if the tips of everything metal were rippling, now that the sun is almost at its zenith. I haven’t had coffee. Héctor suggests we have lunch together. During the meal, Héctor says, I think, that travel will do me good, take me out of myself a bit. Then he starts, out of habit, to talk about Cat. I think Cat, he says, just doesn’t want to grow up. Predictable end for Cat: a nuthouse. He asks me if I will see him before I leave. And as Héctor talks at the other end of the table, from above his head and his elastic face, above his perfectly cleaned and coiffed hair, the tumult of the restaurant, of which we, too, form a part, the homogeneous noise of the interior where we sit is like an orchestral accompaniment, a base that improves Héctor’s voice, it seems to me, slightly. There is a deafening cacophony of noise. Someone in a gray overcoat, clean-shaven, opens the front door and enters, followed by two women. He approaches our table, removing his black leather gloves. I feel his cold hand when I shake it, because Héctor has introduced him to me. He’s a painter from Buenos Aires or something like that; he has the air of someone who is moving up in the world, or has moved up in the world, economically speaking. The two women linger by the door, taking off their coats. They talk about something they were doing together last night at the time of the explosions. They have been, it seems, at a party or something like that. They mention something that happened, something funny, it seems, because they laugh and Héctor, who is standing next to his chair — just like me, leaning over, with my knees half bent, my left hand holding a glass of wine — says that when I heard the first explosion I was entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, and that, according to me, when the second explosion went off, the cards on the table were the ace winning against the king on top, the jack and the knight below. And I told him, says Héctor. I told him: Art imitates life. The man throws his head back when he laughs, exposing his shaved neck. Then he leaves. He sits with the women at a table behind Héctor’s head, and I continue to see them the whole time beyond his elastic face, while Héctor is talks about Cat. Not just growing up: Cat has never shown a real or consistent interest in any serious pursuit his whole life. He’s too mercurial. Héctor keeps talking, but all the while food is disappearing from his plate. At last he uses a piece of bread to soak up the red sauce, leaving the white porcelain streaked with red lines, dry and flecked with white. The food must be gathering now in his stomach, which has begun to work in its own way. Two or three discrete belches attest to this work. Then Héctor adjusts his chair and lights, having meticulously prepared it beforehand, a pipe. I smoke a cigarette. Héctor seems to be reflecting on the things he has just said about Cat, as if it is the first time he has said them and he is trying to polish them, mull them over in his mind to reformulate them more precisely. But he has already formed them many times, with that same disjointed style, with that same rhetoric doubly weakened by lack of conviction and repetition. Something about the imminent winter settling down outside has invaded the restaurant, and I think for a moment, fragmentarily, about the breaches in the embankment, opened onto the coastal road, about the asphalt, cracked at the borders and strewn with rubble all around. I think that Héctor must not have looked at me this whole time. I think that he has not even looked at the smoke from his pipe as it unwinds slowly before his face, a blue smoke, and that what he seems to be contemplating now, with his half-closed eyes, is neither the blue smoke nor any present point, nor my face. So entering the games room at the Progress Club with Tomatis, he says, brusquely. Yes, I say. His elastic face flinches from the smoke, and it is obvious how the skin there has worn away and wrinkled over the years. More than feeling unfamiliar, I tell him, then, when he asks me how I will feel abroad, I will have to deal with the unfamiliar thought that a city where I was born and where I have lived nearly thirty years will continue living without me, and then I say that a city is an abstraction we concede to so we can give a particular name to a series of places that are fragmentary, unconnected, lifeless, and that most often exist in imaginary time, bereft of us. And then, slowly at first, timid, polished and perfected through continuous repetition, like the foot of a marble saint smoothed by the kisses of interminable pilgrims, in an order that varies less and less, the stream of Héctor’s memories of Europe: his three years living in Paris, first on the rue des Ciseaux, then on the r