Like that. Or, if you like, more or less — more or less like that, no? Through his glasses the Mathematician passed his gaze over the illuminated cabin, without paying, as they say, too much attention to the motionless heads protruding over the seats, or to the windows covered by that cottony substance that intercepts the external light and paradoxically emphasizes the artificial clarity in the cabin. Over the years he had gained some weight, but not much, because his conviction that sports was the best way to counterbalance his sedentariness had preserved him — through a methodical but less obsessive practice than the worship of the body that emerged in the West after the death of the gods — from the ravages time inflicts on the body of a forty-year-old, but his blonde hair had dulled and turned somewhat ashen, and extremely fine wrinkles, closer to those of an infant than an old man, creased his face in clusters of more or less parallel lines whose orientation reproduced on his skin the hidden location of his facial muscles. The sudden burst of laughter on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the day before, resonated inside him with the singular quality of sonorous recollections that, while they return silently to memory, do not lose their timbre, color, or intensity. The well-being came less from the implicit but ultimately restrained joy of the conversation itself and the context that produced it, than from the effect of certain words, of certain associations that, in an unexpected way, allowed him to unbind, or unglue rather, sections of his life that had become superimposed and stuck together, the way those posters on city walls, under successive layers of paste and printed paper, form a kind of crust whose tattered and distressed edges can barely be made out, though you know that on each covered page persists, invisible, an image. Since the day before, many of those covered images had reappeared thanks, not to his own memories, but to Pichón’s — Pichón, no? — who despite the privilege of experience was just as lost in a deceptive uncertainty, while at the time he, the Mathematician, had criticized himself for having been in Frankfurt, depriving himself of the means of capturing, at a fixed point in reality, the approximate sequence of events with the network of his five senses.
Suddenly the Mathematician remembered a dream, or rather, a nightmare. He had been passing a somewhat vacuous gaze over the cabin, produced by the emotional neutrality transformed, as the laughter dissipated in his memory, from the well-being of a few moments earlier — and if, as they say, pleasure is nothing but the absence of pain, his internal vacuousness, without a doubt painless, could be considered a consequence of that well-being. The airplane’s illusory, slightly oblique detention in the cottony Limbo persisted, blocking the windows, and the Mathematician, sitting at the outside end of a row of seats halfway to the back, could see the cabin floor declining almost imperceptibly down, toward the front of the plane, and he thought again, somewhat amazed, of that elemental mechanical paradox that demonstrates that motionlessness is what creates motion, that motion is simply a reference to motionlessness, and just then the machine, which had swallowed him in Paris and would spit him out in Stockholm a few minutes from now, as if it had been aware of his thoughts, correcting its position, its speed maybe, or its direction, he couldn’t tell, produced, benevolently, a series of vibrations that caused it to tremble a little, along with everything it carried inside, as though it had wanted to confirm for the Mathematician that the Limbo was transitory, a variant lull, and that each of those vibrations was reactivating time, space, matter, thought, until, after those two or three shivers that reintroduced the swarm of distinction into the heart of the singular, it returned to complete stillness. The Mathematician’s nightmare was as follows: Walking through an indistinct and deserted city, he found a piece of paper lying on the sidewalk, a kind of rigid strip four or five centimeters long and one centimeter wide; for several moments he stood observing it, without mistrust but without hurry, trying to understand its significance, its use, the likely circumstances that had brought it there — almost, almost its mystery. Bent toward it, but without deciding to pick it up, intrigued, he observed it, until finally he took it up into the palm of his hand to study it closer, realizing that it actually wasn’t a rigid strip but a sheet folded like an accordion, whose external band, seen from above, had looked like a flat strip. Now that he had it close, he noticed that he had missed the primary feature: what he had thought was a stain in the middle of the strip was actually his own portrait, printed vertically, his head and shoulders, not clearly either a drawing or a photograph, his own portrait, no? with an expression that seemed naïve, youthful, somewhat tender. Fascinated by his discovery, his fingers shaking a little, he turned the strip to the opposite face, in the literal sense of the word, and another portrait was printed in the middle of the strip, at the same height as on the obverse side; only the expression had changed, so much so that, for an instant, he thought it was someone else — but it wasn’t, it was him, himself. On the reverse side, the expression was furrowed, solemn, and seemed to be trying to display a strength of character that because of its ostentation was ultimately unconvincing. All of this inspired a certain levity and heightened his curiosity, and taking the ends of the object between the tips of his index finger and thumb, he began to unfold the accordion very slowly, confirming what he had predicted, that on each face of the folds on the paper, at the same height as the previous, there was his portrait, not clearly either a drawing or a photograph; on each of the portraits the expression was so different that, although he knew it was the same person, for an instant he suffered the brief delusion, passing a moment later, that it wasn’t him. Separating his symmetrically facing thumbs and index fingers toward the edges of the paper, he unfolded the accordion a little more, knowing that he would be increasing the variety of miniature portraits, printed vertically at the same height, beginning now to form a small multitude of, to him, amusingly conventional expressions. A second-rate actor in the broadest downmarket television series wouldn’t have employed more vulgar gestures to effect innocence, pain, guilelessness, intelligence, avarice, resolution, disdain, cunning, desire, emotions, and traces of a personality which appeared so domesticated, so pliant to conventions, that they stank of servitude but nevertheless revealed, through hidden details, a compassionate attitude toward the spectator.
Of course, he thought. This is a dream. It signifies that we don’t have one personality but many. In addition, all the expressions we assume are insincere, incomplete, and conventional. My dreams are so transparent, and he continued unfolding the strip. By now he had unfolded it so much that he stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his arms stretched apart, and the sheet, which started off straight and rigid, seemed to have softened somewhat, because of the increasing width, and curved down. His first moment of unease, abruptly effacing his amusement, was a physical one, because he realized that, no matter how far he stretched his arms, he wouldn’t be able to unfold the accordion completely, but at the same time he figured out that he could let go of the ends, grab the sheet with both hands and open it from the middle in order to complete the operation without needing to stretch his arms and instead sliding the paper strip apart with his hands, letting the already unfolded ends accumulate on the ground. He did this. But as he slid it open, it continued unfolding. At his feet, on the indistinct and blurry sidewalk, the accordion folded strip accumulated in two symmetrical piles, without his being able to reach the center. He quickened the sliding but the only thing he accomplished was to instill them, on account of the diversity of effigies printed on the folds, with caricaturish life as the stereotypical expressions were juxtaposed and, through a phenomenon similar to retinal persistence, created a contradictory and unknown face: then the expression was distorted and lost its conventional aspect, taking on vertiginous and demented features, so that, sensing that his unease was becoming anguish, he decided to slow down. Now, as they passed slowly, the effigies were increasingly decayed and indistinct and the whiteness of the page darkened, taking on an exhausted and yellowed tint. His anguish grew when he sensed that the texture, consistency, and temperature of the paper had changed, resembling a material that was familiar but which he resisted examining directly; he continued slowly unfolding the infinite strip with this head turned away and his eyes closed tight. Shaking his hands he tried to release the strip, but it was useless. He turned his head and opened his eyes. He was naked on the sidewalk, and the strip he was sliding open between his fingers was the skin coming off his own body in a continuous and even ribbon, like a bandage being unwound. It was a single, infinite length of skin unwinding. And when he screamed, sitting up in the hotel bed, in the dark, without realizing at first that it was a nightmare, it was because he had started to realize before waking up that when the strip finished unfolding, where he was, where he had been, nothing would be left, not a speck, not a sign, not anything that his purely external body was carrying inside it — nothing, no? — but a hole, a transparency, the invisible and once again homogenous space, the passive receptor of the light he had considered his kingdom and yet where not one of his false features would be imprinted.