You find no answer to this question that Marana lets fall almost with indifference. Holding your breath, you have followed from letter to letter the transformations of the woman reader, as if it were always the same person. But even if they were many persons, to all of them you attribute the appearance of Ludmilla.... Isn’t it like her to insist that now one can ask of the novel only to stir a depth of buried anguish, as the final condition of truth which will save it from being an assembly-line product, a destiny it can no longer escape? The image of her naked under the equatorial sun already seems more credible to you than that of her behind the Sultana’s veil, but it could still be a single Mata Hari who moves, pensively, through extra-European revolutions to open the way for the bulldozers of a cement firm....Dispel this image, and receive that of the deck chair as it comes toward you through the limpid Alpine air. Here you are ready to drop everything: leave, track down Flannery’s hideaway, simply to watch with a spyglass the woman reading or to seek her traces in the diary of the blocked writer.... (Or is what tempts you the idea of being able to resume your own reading of Looks down in the gathering shadow, even under another title and signed by another name?) But now Marana transmits more and more distressing news: there she is hostage of hijackers, then prisoner in a Manhattan slum. How did she end up over there, chained to an instrument of torture? Why is she being forced to undergo as a torment what is her natural condition, reading? And what hidden plan makes the paths of these characters cross constantly: she, Marana, the mysterious sect that steals manuscripts?
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.
“I thought I was alone in the elevator,” Marana writes, again from New York. “Instead a form rises at my side: a youth with hair of arboreal extent had been crouched in a corner, wrapped in clothes of rough canvas. This is not a proper elevator so much as a freight elevator, a cage closed by a folding gate. At every floor a perspective of deserted rooms appears, faded walls with the mark of vanished furniture and uprooted pipes, a desert of moldy floors and ceilings. Using his red hands with their long wrists, the young man stops the elevator between two floors.
“‘Give me the manuscript. We’re the ones you have brought it to, not the others. Even if you were thinking the opposite. This is a true book, even if its author has written so many false ones. So it comes to us.’
“With a judo movement he knocks me to the floor and seizes the manuscript. I realize at this moment that the young fanatic is convinced he is holding the diary of Silas Flannery’s spiritual crisis and not the outline of one of his usual thrillers. It’s amazing how prompt these secret sects are to pick up any piece of news, whether true or false, that coincides with their expectations. Flannery’s crisis had aroused the two rival factions of Apocryphal Power and, with opposing hopes, they had unleashed their informers in the valleys around the novelist’s chalet. The Wing of Shadow people, knowing that the great fabricator of assembly-line novels was no longer able to believe in his tricks, had convinced themselves that his next novel would mark the switch from cheap and relative bad faith to essential and absolute bad faith, the masterpiece of falsity as knowledge, and would therefore be the book they had been seeking for such a long time. The Wing of Light followers, on the other hand, thought that from the crisis of such a professional in falsehood only a cataclysm of truth could be born, and this is what they believed the writer’s diary of which there was so much talk would be.... At the rumor, circulated by Flannery, that I had stolen an important manuscript from him, each side identified the manuscript with the object of its search, and both set out to find me, the Wing of Shadow causing the hijacking of the plane, the Wing of Light that of the elevator....
“The arboreal young man, having hidden the manuscript in his jacket, slipped out of the elevator, slammed the gate in my face, and is now pressing the button to make me disappear downward, after hurling a final threat at me: ‘The score with you isn’t settled, Agent of Mystification! We still have to liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the Counterfeiters!’ I laugh as I slowly sink. ‘There is no machine, kiddo. It’s the Father of Stories who dictates our books!’
“He brings the elevator back up. ‘Did you say the Father of Stories?’ He has turned pale. For years the followers of the sect have been searching for the old blind man, across all the continents, where his legend is handed down in countless local variants.
“‘Yes, go tell that to the Archangel of Light! Tell him I’ve found the Father of Stories! I have him in my hands, and he’s working for me! Electronic machine, my foot!’ And now I’m the one who presses the DOWN button.”
At this point three simultaneous desires are competing in your soul. You would be ready to leave immediately, cross the ocean, explore the continent beneath the Southern Cross until you can find the latest hiding place of Ermes Marana and wrest the truth from him, or at least get from him the continuations of the interrupted novels. At the same time you want to ask Cavedagna if he can immediately let you read In a network of lines that enlace by the pseudo (or genuine?) Flannery, which might also be the same thing as Looks down in the gathering shadow by the genuine (or pseudo?) Vandervelde. And you can’t wait to run to the café where you are to meet Ludmilla, to tell her the confused results of your investigation and to convince yourself, by seeing her, that there can be nothing in common between her and the women readers encountered around the world by the mythomane translator.
The last two desires are easily satisfied, and are not mutually exclusive. In the café, waiting for Ludmilla, you begin to read the book sent by Marana.
In a network of lines that enlace
The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort. Nor do I believe that instead of an attempted description of this state of the spirit, a metaphor would serve better—for example, the piercing sting of an arrow that penetrates a hip’s naked flesh. This is not because one cannot employ an imaginary sensation to portray a known sensation—though nobody these days knows the feeling of being struck by an arrow, we all believe we can easily imagine it, the sense of being helpless, without protection in the presence of something that reaches us from alien and unknown spaces, and this also applies very well to the ring of the telephone—but, rather, because the arrow’s peremptory inexorability, without modulations, excludes all the intentions, implications, hesitations possible in the voice of someone I do not see, though even before he says anything I can already predict, if not what he will say, at least what my reaction to what he is about to say will be. Ideally, the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because all around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that apparently cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is occupied by the ring, and my presence is no longer what it was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately, but as a diffusio
n through space and time of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will.
Perhaps the mistake lies in establishing that at the beginning I and a telephone are in a finite space such as my house would be, whereas what I must communicate is my situation with regard to numerous telephones that ring; these telephones are perhaps not calling me, have no relation to me, but the mere fact that I can be called to a telephone suffices to make it possible or at least conceivable that I may be called by all telephones. For example, when the telephone rings in a house near mine, for a moment I wonder if it is ringing in my house—a suspicion that immediately proves unfounded but which still leaves a wake, since it is possible that the call might really be for me and through a wrong number or crossed wires it has gone to my neighbor, and this is all the more possible since in that house there is nobody to answer and the telephone keeps ringing, and then in the irrational logic that ringing never fails to provoke in me, I think: Perhaps it is indeed for me, perhaps my neighbor is at home but does not answer because he knows, perhaps also the person calling knows he is calling a wrong number but does so deliberately to keep me in this state, knowing I cannot answer but know that I should answer.
Or else the anxiety when I have just left the house and I hear a telephone ringing that could be in my house or in another apartment and I rush back, I arrive breathless, having run up the stairs, and the telephone falls silent and I will never know if the call was for me.
Or else also when I am out in the streets, and I hear telephones ring in strange houses; even when I am in strange cities, in cities where my presence is unknown to anyone, even then, hearing a ring, my first thought every time for a fraction of a second is that the telephone is calling me, and in the following fraction of a second there is the relief of knowing myself excluded for the moment from every call, unattainable, safe, but this relief also lasts a mere fraction of a second, because immediately afterward I think that it is not only that strange telephone that is ringing; many kilometers away, hundreds, thousands of kilometers, there is also the telephone in my house, which certainly at that same moment is ringing repeatedly in the deserted rooms, and again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
Every morning before my classes begin I do an hour of jogging; that is, I put on my Olympic sweatsuit and I go out to run, because I feel the need to move, because the doctors have ordered it to combat the excess weight that oppresses me, and also to relieve my nerves a little. During the day in this place, if you do not go to the campus, to the library, to audit colleagues’ courses, or to the university coffee shop, you do not know where to go; therefore the only thing is to start running this way or that on the hill, among the maples and the willows, as many students do and also many of my colleagues. We cross on the rustling paths of leaves and sometimes we say “Hi!” to each other, sometimes nothing, because we have to save our breath. This, too, is an advantage running has over other sports: everybody is on his own and is not required to answer to others.
The hill is entirely built up, and as I run I pass two-story wooden houses with yards, all different and all similar, and every so often I hear a telephone ring. This makes me nervous; instinctively I slow down; I prick up my ears to hear whether somebody is answering and I become impatient when the ringing continues. Continuing my run, I pass another house in which a telephone is ringing, and I think: There is a telephone chasing me, there is somebody looking up all the numbers on Chestnut Lane in the directory, and he is calling one house after the other to see if he can overtake me.
Sometimes the houses are all silent and deserted, squirrels run up the tree trunks, magpies swoop down to peck at the feed set out for them in wooden bowls. As I run, I feel a vague sensation of alarm, and even before I can pick up the sound with my ear, my mind records the possibility of the ring, almost summons it up, sucks it from its own absence, and at that moment from a house comes, first muffled then gradually more distinct, the trill of the bell, whose vibrations perhaps for some time had already been caught by an antenna inside me before my hearing perceived them, and there I go rushing in an absurd frenzy, I am the prisoner of a circle in whose center is the telephone ringing inside that house, I run without moving away, I hover without shortening my stride.
“If nobody has answered by now, it means nobody is home.... But why do they keep calling, then? What are they hoping? Does a deaf man perhaps live there, and do they hope that by insisting they will make themselves heard? Perhaps a paralytic lives there, and you have to allow a great deal of time so that he can crawl to the phone....Perhaps a suicide lives there, and as long as you keep calling him, some hope remains of preventing his extreme act....” I think perhaps I should try to make myself useful, lend a hand, help the deaf man, the paralytic, the suicide.... And at the same time I think—in the absurd logic at work inside me—that in doing so, I could make sure the call is not by chance for me....
Still running, I push open the gate, enter the yard, circle the house, explore the ground behind it, dash behind the garage, to the tool shed, the doghouse. Everything seems deserted, empty. Through an open window in the rear a room can be seen, in disorder, the telephone on the table continuing to ring. The shutter slams; the window frame is caught in the tattered curtain.
I have circled the house three times; I continue to perform the movements of jogging, raising elbows and heels, breathing with the rhythm of my run so that it is clear my intrusion is not that of a thief; if they caught me at this moment I would have a hard time explaining that I came in because I heard the telephone ring. A dog barks; not here—it is the dog of another house that cannot be seen—but for a moment the signal “barking dog” is stronger in me than the “ringing telephone,” and this is enough to open a passage in the circle that was holding me prisoner there; now I resume running among the trees along the street, leaving behind me the increasingly muffled ringing.
I run until there are no more houses. In a field I stop to catch my breath. I do some knee bends, some push-ups, I massage the muscles of my legs so they will not get cold. I look at the time. I am late, I must go back if I do not want to keep my students waiting. All I need is for the rumor to spread that I go running through the woods when I should be teaching.... I fling myself onto the return road, paying no attention to anything; I will not even recognize that house, I will pass it without noticing. For that matter, the house is exactly like the others in every respect, and the only way it could stand out would be if the telephone were to ring again, which is impossible....
The more I turn these thoughts over in my head, as I run downhill, the more I seem to hear that ring again; it grows more and more clear and distinct, there, I am again in sight of the house and the telephone is still ringing. I enter the garden, I go around behind the house, I run to the window. I have only to reach out to pick up the receiver. Breathless, I say, “He’s not here...” and from the receiver a voice—a bit vexed, but only a bit, for what is most striking about this voice is its coldness, its calm—says: “Now, you listen to me. Marjorie is here, she’ll be waking in a little while, but she’s tied up and can’t get away. Write down this address carefully: one-fifteen Hillside Drive. If you come to get her, OK; otherwise, there’s a can of kerosene in the basement and a charge of plastic attached to a timer. In half an hour this house will go up in flames...”
“But I’m not—” I begin to answer.
They have already hung up.
Now what do I do? Of course I could call the police, the fire department, on this same telephone, but how can I explain, how can I justify the fact that I, in other words how can I who have nothing to do with it have anything to do with it? I start running again, I circle the house once more, then I resume my way.
I am sorry for this Marjorie, but if she has got herself into such a jam she must be mixed up in God knows what things, and if I stepped forward to save her, nobody would believe that I do not know her, there would be a great scandal, I am a professor at anot
her university invited here as visiting professor, the prestige of both universities would suffer....
To be sure, when a life is in the balance these considerations should take a back seat.... I slow down. I could enter any one of these houses, ask them if they will let me call the police, say first of all quite clearly that I do not know this Marjorie, I do not know any Marjorie....
To tell the truth, here at the university there is a student named Marjorie, Marjorie Stubbs: I noticed her immediately among the girls attending my classes. She is a girl who you might say appealed to me a lot, too bad that the time I invited her to my house to lend her some books an embarrassing situation may have been created. It was a mistake to invite her: this was during my first days of teaching, they did not yet know the sort I am here, she could misunderstand my intentions, that misunderstanding in fact took place, an unpleasant misunderstanding, even now very hard to clarify because she has that ironic way of looking at me, and I am unable to address a word to her without stammering, the other girls also look at me with an ironic smile....
Yes, I would not want this uneasiness now reawakened in me by the name Marjorie to keep me from intervening to help another Marjorie, whose life is in danger.... Unless it is the same Marjorie ... Unless that telephone call was aimed personally at me ... A very powerful band of gangsters is keeping an eye on me, they know that every morning I go jogging along that road, maybe they have a lookout on the hill with a telescope to follow my steps, when I approach that deserted house they call on the telephone, it is me they are calling, because they know the unfortunate impression I made on Marjorie that day at my house and they are blackmailing me....
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Page 13