I’d correctly guessed her absolute intolerance for anything that hinted at permanence, at setting down roots. Everything she did, every desire or thought that arose in her for a moment, a moment later was already a thousand miles away, and if she happened to feel that any of it still had a grip on her, there were angry outbursts, fits of rage, even unseemly hysterics.
It seemed her body was the only thing that always seemed to give her pleasure, though at times she didn’t seem at all happy with it. In fact, she said she hated it. But she was constantly staring at it in the mirror, every part and every feature, trying out every pose, every expression she could possibly come up with using her intensely bright, lively eyes, her quivering nostrils, her haughty red mouth, her amazingly mobile jaw. Like an actress, she posed simply for the joy of it, not because she imagined that all those expressions might be of any use to her in life, beyond just having a little fun with fleeting flirtatiousness or playful provocation.
One morning I saw her trying on a smile and studying her reflection at length in the hand mirror she kept with her on the bed. It was a pitiful, tender smile, despite the almost childlike glint of mischievousness in her eyes. Then seeing her repeat that same exact smile for me, alive, as if it had just suddenly appeared right then, spontaneously, for me, provoked a wave of rebellion in me.
I told her I wasn’t her mirror.
She wasn’t offended. She asked if that smile, the way I’d just seen it, was the same one she’d seen and studied in the mirror earlier.
Annoyed by her insistence, I replied: “How should I know? I couldn’t possibly know how you saw yourself. Smile like that and have someone take your picture.”
“I already have a picture,” she said. “A big one. There in the bottom dresser drawer. Would you get it for me, please?”
The drawer was full of her photos. She showed me plenty of them, old ones and more recent.
“All dead,” I told her.
She whipped her head around and looked right at me. “Dead?”
“No matter how alive they seem.”
“Even this one with the smile?”
“And this thoughtful one, and this with the eyes lowered.”
“But how can she be dead if I’m right here, alive?”
“Oh, you’re alive, yes. Because you’re not looking at yourself. But when you’re in front of a mirror, in the moment when you look at yourself, you’re no longer alive.”
“Why not?”
“Because you have to stop your life for a second to see yourself. Just like when you’re in front of a camera. You pose. And posing is like becoming a statue for a moment. Life is in constant motion and can never truly see itself.
“So you mean that since I’m alive, I’ve never seen myself?”
“Never. Not the way I can see you. But I only see a version of you that’s mine alone—it’s definitely not yours. You might have caught a glimpse of yours, alive, perhaps in some snapshot someone took of you, and it was certainly an unpleasant surprise. Maybe you even had a hard time recognizing yourself in it, caught in frenzied, awkward movement.
“That’s true.”
“You can’t know yourself unless you’re posed. Like a statue. Not alive. When someone is living, they live, they don’t look at themselves. To know yourself is to die. You spend so much time gazing at yourself in that mirror, in every mirror, because you don’t live—you don’t know how, or you can’t, or you don’t want to live. You’re so fixated on knowing yourself that you don’t live.”
“That’s not true at all! I can barely hold still for a second.”
“But you always want to look at yourself. In every act of your life. No matter what action you take, what move you make, it’s like you’ve got an image of yourself in mind. And maybe that’s what’s causing your restlessness. You don’t want your sentiment to be blind. You force it to open its eyes and see itself in the mirror you’re constantly putting in front of it. And as soon as your sentiment sees itself, it freezes in you. You can’t live in front of a mirror. You need to be sure never to see yourself. Because you’ll never be able to know yourself the way others see you, anyway. Besides, what’s the point of knowing yourself only from your own point of view? You may even get to the point where you no longer understand why you’ve got to have that image the mirror reflects back to you.”
She stared off into the distance, thinking, for a long time.
After that little speech of mine and everything I’d already told her about all my mental anguish, I’m certain the boundless vision of our irreparable solitude appeared before her at that moment just as it did before me, as much more frightening as it was more clear. Every object was fearfully isolated by its own appearance. And perhaps she no longer saw any reason to go on wearing her face, if in that solitude, she wouldn’t even be able to see herself alive, while others, from the outside, isolating her, were seeing who-knows-what when they looked at her.
All pride fell by the wayside.
Seeing things with eyes that couldn’t know how other eyes were seeing the same things.
Speaking so as not to be understood.
There was no longer any point in being something for yourself.
And nothing was true anymore, if nothing was true unto itself. Each person takes it as his own personal truth, usurping it to fill his solitude anyway, and to somehow give substance to his life, day by day.
There I was, at the foot of her bed, with an expression that was unknown to me and inscrutable to her, a castaway in her solitude just as she was in mine, there in front of me, on her bed, with those frozen, faraway eyes, pale, one elbow resting on her pillow, her hand supporting her head of tousled hair.
She felt an invincible attraction to everything I was telling her, along with a sort of revulsion, and at times, almost hatred. I saw it flash in her eyes as she listened to my words with the most eager attention.
Yet she wanted me to keep talking, to tell her everything that crossed my mind: impressions, thoughts. And I was babbling on, almost mindlessly. Or more accurately, my mind was speaking on its own, as if needing to vent some agonizing pressure.
“You stand at a window and look out at the world, thinking everything’s just the way it seems to you. You look down at the people passing by, tiny from your immense perspective from such a high window. You can’t help but feel that immensity in yourself when you happen to see a friend pass by down there, and recognize him, but from such a high perspective he seems no larger than your finger. Oh, but what if it occurred to you to call down to him and ask: ‘Tell me, what do I look like from this window?’ The thought never crosses your mind, because you don’t think about the image the passersby have of the window and of you looking out it. You’d have to make the effort to detach yourself from the conditions you impose on the reality of everyone walking along down below, who live for a moment in your immense perspective as tiny passersby on their way. You don’t make this effort because it never occurs to you to question what image they have of your window, one of many, small, high up, or of you, so teeny-tiny there at that window, looking out and waving your little arm.
She pictured herself as I described her: teeny-tiny, at a high window, looking out and waving her little arm. She laughed.
There were flashes, flickers. Then silence returned to the little bedroom. Every now and then, like a shadow, her elderly aunt would appear, the one who lived with Anna Rosa. She was fat, apathetic, with enormous, terribly crossed hazel eyes. She would linger at the doorway, in the liquid shadows of the bedroom, with her pale, swollen hands on her abdomen, looking like an aquarium monster. Then, without a word, she’d walk away.
With that aunt, Anna Rosa would barely exchange a word all day long. She lived with herself, by herself. She read, she daydreamed, but always restless, both with her reading and with her daydreams. She would go out to do a little shopping or see this or that friend, but they all seemed silly and empty to her. She enjoyed shocking them, then, once home, felt tired and bor
ed with everything. She had certain invincible revulsions that would reveal themselves when she would jump or make a sudden noise at the mention of something. Perhaps these revulsions stemmed back to her reading the medical books found in the library which had belonged to her father, who had been a doctor. She insisted she’d never get married.
I have no idea what thought she’d formed of me. She certainly regarded me with extraordinary interest, the way I seemed so lost back then, lost in my own thoughts and the uncertainty of it all.
This uncertainty in me recoiled from every limit, from every support, and now it was practically second nature for it to withdraw from any consistent form, the way the ocean pulls back from the shore. This uncertainty, opening like a void in my eyes, was undoubtedly attractive to her, but sometimes, watching her, I even had the strange impression that she found it all a little bit amusing—something that you could end up chuckling over, having a man there at the foot of the bed, in such an unimaginable mental state, so entirely divided that he didn’t know how he’d manage to go on living tomorrow, when, thanks to Sclepis’ intervention, he’d get his money back from the bank and would be stripped and freed of everything.
She was certain now that I’d make it to the final step, becoming a complete and utter madman. And this amused her to no end and also gave her a certain measure of pride for having predicted, in her discussions with my wife, not this exactly, but at any rate she’d determined I was no common man, but one quite apart from other people, and she could expect something extraordinary from me one day. In order to present some immediate evidence to others, particularly to my wife, that she’d been right in her assessment of me, she wasted no time calling me, informing me of their intentions against me, urging me to go see the Monsignor. Now she was thrilled with me, seeing me the way she did at the foot of her bed, steady and calm, waiting for what needed to happen, no longer worried about anything or anyone.
And yet, she was precisely the one who wanted to kill me, at that exact moment when this satisfaction I gave her, making her chuckle, turned into a deep pity for me, as if in fascinated response to what must’ve been in my eyes as I watched her from the infinite distance of an ageless time.
I don’t know exactly how it happened. It was when I was looking at her from that far-off distance, I spoke words I no longer recall, words in which she must’ve heard my all-consuming yearning to devote all the life within me, everything I could’ve been, in order to become someone she would’ve wanted me to be, and for myself, truly no one, no one at all. I do know that from her bed she reached her arms out to me. I know she drew me towards her.
A moment later, I rolled out of that bed, blind, mortally wounded in the chest by that little revolver she kept under her pillow.
The arguments she voiced later in her defense must be true. Namely, she was spurred to kill me by the sudden, instinctive horror of the act which she felt herself about to be drawn into by the strange allure of everything I’d told her over those last few days.
BOOK EIGHT
1 ~ The Magistrate Demands His Due Time
Usually there’s nothing to complain about when the normal course of justice is swift.
The magistrate appointed to prepare the case against Anna Rosa, honest by nature and on principle, wanted to be painstakingly scrupulous and waste months and months gathering all the evidence and witness testimonies, obviously, before arriving at the so-called ascertainment of facts.
But it hadn’t been possible to get any kind of answers out of me at the first interrogation they wanted to conduct, right after they’d transported me from Anna Rosa’s bedroom to the hospital. Later, when the doctors permitted me to speak, the first response I gave, instead of embarrassing the man questioning me, embarrassed me.
Here it is: Anna Rosa’s lightning-fast transition from that pity which had prompted her to reach her arms out to me from the bed, to the instinctive impulse which had driven her to commit such a violent act against me while I was already blinded by the warmth of her most provocative body next to mine, honestly left me neither the time nor the opportunity to notice that she’d suddenly fished the little revolver out from under her pillow to shoot me. Therefore, since it seemed inconceivable that she would first pull me towards her, then want to kill me, it was with utter sincerity that that I provided the explanation of the event that seemed most likely to me as I was being interrogated—namely, that my injury, just like the earlier injury to her foot, was accidental, caused by the obviously reprehensible fact that the revolver was under the pillow, and that I certainly could have bumped it myself, causing it to fire, in my effort to lift my patient, who had asked me to help her sit up in bed.
For me the lie (a dutiful lie) was only in that very last part of my statement. To my interrogator, however, the whole thing seemed so outlandish that he harshly reprimanded me. He informed me that, fortunately, the court had already received the unequivocal confession of the guilty party. Then, due to an irresistible need to demonstrate my sincerity, I naively displayed utter amazement and expressed great curiosity to find out what possible reason she could have given for her violent attack against me.
My question was answered with such a thunderous, explosive snort that I almost had to wipe spittle off my face.
“Oh, you just wanted to help her sit up in bed, huh?”
I was left in stunned silence.
The court must have already gotten their hands on my wife’s initial statement. My wife, after hearing this new bit of evidence, could certainly have testified with a clear conscience, now more than ever, as to the long-standing nature of my love for Anna Rosa.
Undoubtedly the court would have established that Anna Rosa had tried to kill me in self-defense against a brutal aggression on my part, if Anna Rosa herself hadn’t sworn under oath to the magistrate that there really had been no such assault by me, but only that strange allure exerted on her by my extremely curious reflections on life—an allure that she’d allowed herself to get so caught up in that she was reduced to committing that act of madness.
The scrupulous magistrate, dissatisfied with the brief account that Anna Rosa had been able to provide him about those reflections of mine, felt it was his duty to obtain more precise and detailed information about them, so he decided to come and talk to me in person.
2 ~ The Green Woolen Blanket
I’d been brought back home from the hospital on a stretcher, and having already started down the road to recovery, I’d gotten out of bed to spend those days blissfully settled on an easy chair next to the window, with a green woolen blanket on my legs.
I felt drunk, swimming in a soft, tranquil, dreamlike void. Spring had returned, and the sun’s first warmth filled me with an inexpressibly delightful languor. I was almost afraid of being hit by the fresh, tender, limpid air coming through the half-open window, so I kept myself covered up. But every now and then I’d look up and gaze at that bright March azure, dusted by bright, happy clouds. Then I would look at my hands, still pale and trembling. I lowered them to my lap and gently caressed the green down of that woolen blanket with my fingertips. I could see the countryside in it—as if it were all a boundless expanse of wheat. Caressing it brought me great joy, making me feel like I was really there in the midst of all that grain, with a sense of oblivious distance that provoked a gentle sort of anguish, a sweet, sweet anguish.
Oh, to lose myself there, to stretch out and surrender amidst the grass, the silence, the sky—recharging my soul with all that empty blueness, letting my every thought, my every memory run aground there!
Could that magistrate have possibly come at a more inopportune moment, I wonder?
Thinking it over, I regret if he left my house that day with the impression that I was trying to make fun of him. He looked a bit like a mole, with his two tiny hands always up around his mouth and his tiny leaden eyes, squinting, almost sightless. His entire skinny, poorly dressed body was deformed, with one shoulder higher than the other. Out in the street, he walke
d diagonally, like a dog, despite the fact that when it came to morals, everyone said no one was better at following the straight and narrow than he.
My reflections on life?
“Oh, your Honor,” I said, “believe me, it’s impossible for me to repeat them for you. Look, look here!”
And I showed him the green woolen blanket, gently running my hand over it.
“It’s your duty to collect and prepare all the evidence that the court will need tomorrow to issue their ruling, correct? And you’ve come to ask my reflections on life, the same reflections that motivated the accused to try to kill me? But if I were to repeat them to you, your Honor, I’d be very worried that you’d try to kill someone, too. Not me this time, but yourself out of remorse for having carried out the duties of your office for all these years. No, no, I won’t tell you, your Honor! Instead, it’d be good if you plugged your ears to avoid hearing the violent fury of the river current breaking against the embankment, beyond the limits that you, as a good magistrate, have drawn up and imposed to keep your scrupulous conscience in line. They can collapse, you know? In a tempestuous moment as with Miss Anna Rosa. What violent fury? Oh, that of a great, swollen river, your Honor! You’ve done a fine job channeling it in your affections, in the duties you’ve assumed, in the practices you’ve outlined, but then comes the flood, your Honor, and the river overflows it banks and makes a mess of everything. I know. Everything submerged, for me, your Honor! I dived in and now I’m swimming in it. I’m swimming in it. And if only you knew how far away I was already! I can hardly see you anymore. Take care of yourself, your Honor, take care of yourself!”
He sat there gaping, looking at me the way you’d look at a hopeless case. Hoping to shake him out of that distressing pose, I smiled at him. With both hands I lifted the blanket off my legs and showed it to him again, politely asking:
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