2.
They were proceeding along the West Side Elevated Highway, all four in apparently very good spirits, yesterday’s catrafuse, the Romanian for loot, being of immeasurable importance to them, a really big deal, they repeated to each other, slapping each other on the back, regularly breaking into laughter in the driver’s cab, the process of sneaking off with the bozgors’ or that bozo’s gear, and rather than delivering it all to the agreed garbage dump squirreling it away at their pad behind Greenpoint, having gone much smoother than they had imagined it would, since the fake certificate of dumping went unnoticed by everyone, for who the hell would have noticed, since the catrafuse was of the kind that would have been chucked away in any case, and as for Mister Manea, their benefactor as they referred to him, he was unlikely to be interested in such things, or so they told each other, and now they had everything they needed, beds, tables, a wardrobe, chairs, stove and a mass of other little items, enough to furnish a complete apartment, which was nothing to be sneezed at, including coffee cups and shoe brushes, the lot, and all for a single dime that Vasile had thrown out of the cab in superstition as they were leaving, and to throw all this away at the dump, such a wardrobe, such a bed, such a table and chair and stove and coffee cup and shoe brush was out of the question, they had decided, no, they would neatly take it home and no one would have the faintest idea where that was, the point being to spirit the stuff away, and indeed why not do so in Greenpoint for that matter, and fit out the entire apartment of a completely vacant block overlooking Newtown Creek with it, their own apartment, not to put too fine a point on it, the one that, following their arrival in the New World a bare two weeks ago, Mister Manea had offered them for seven hundred and fifty dollars a week, that is to say one hundred and eighty-eight each, on top of the employment, a deal they immediately accepted the day before yesterday when they took stock of the load they were to carry, decided there and then, and began to haul the stuff downstairs, stuff that was to be their own, the tenants of the apartment counting for nothing, not for a moment, Mā bozgoroaicã curvā împutitã, they said with a courteous smile at the woman, and Dāte la o parte bosgor împutit, they said to the man with a sideways glance, and it would have been great to laugh out loud, but they didn’t, just carried on shifting the stuff and left the laughing till later in the evening, when fully loaded up they set off toward Greenpoint, and then again now, when having got over their day of excitement, wondering whether they would be apprehended but weren’t, nobody asking or checking anything, enquiring where they were really taking the catrafuse, no one at all, they could happily drive down the West Side Elevated Highway, leaving behind the horrendous traffic of Twelfth Avenue, in other words after, and only after all this, could they allow themselves to laugh as they sat in the driver’s cab and laughed, after which they left off laughing for a while and stared out of the window, their eyes bright and their mouths wide open with astonishment at the blaze of headlights, their hands in their laps, three pairs of hands with fingers that could not be straightened, thirty terminally crooked fingers from the endless fetching and carrying; three pairs in their laps and one pair, Vasile’s, turning the steering wheel now left, now right, as they cut their way through the unknown, terrifying core of the city that was the frozen center of all their hopes.
3.
They’ve gone, said Korin to the woman on the evening of the first day of the upheaval, and looked terribly sad in the empty apartment, indeed more than sad: broken, defeated, exhausted, and, at the same time, highly tense, continually rubbing his neck, turning his head this way and that, going into his room then coming out again, and repeating this several times, clearly unable to stay in one place, in-out, in-out all the time, and whenever he reached the kitchen he looked through the gap left by the open door into the back room to see the woman sitting immobile on the bed, waiting, then he immediately looked away and moved on, until the evening when he finally plunged in and entered and sat down beside her but carefully so as to reassure her, not frighten her, nor did he talk about the subject he had first thought to talk about, about the discovery in the landing toilet, or about what they should do should they find themselves evicted, since, for his part, he took it for granted that this wasn’t about eviction, so no, he didn’t want to talk about such things, he explained to someone else later, but—and this would be genuinely reassuring—about the three long chapters he would now have to recount in one big go, though he would happily leave them aside or quickly pass over them and not mention them at all, but he couldn’t do this because then it would not be plain, clear, he said, that thing he had promised earlier to explain, and he couldn’t just skip over those three great chapters, three chapters, himself these last few days, nor could he simply say, OK, now everything is absolutely clear, the devil take it, and I won’t write up another line of it, though he might have said it because everything did in fact become absolutely clear, but he still had to finish it and not just abandon it like that, for an archivist does not leave things half done simply because he happens suddenly to have solved the puzzle, the rebus, for what actually happened was that he did in fact suddenly solve the puzzle, only once he had read through the entire material, that was true, but solve it he did and this led him to a comprehensive revaluation of his plans, in other words changed everything, though before he gets on to that, he declared, before he reveals what this is all about, he would say but one word: Corstopitum, that’s it, and just Gibraltar, and just Rome, for whatever happened he had to get back to where he had left off, for it was only the actual sequence of events as always, in every case, that made it possible to understand something, it being a matter solely and exclusively of Continuous Understanding, he said, seeking out the most appropriate phrase in his notebook, which is why he must refer back to Corstopitum and the terrible weather there, for it was truly terrible, this melancholy realm of eternal drizzle, terrible, an enormity, this constantly droning, bone-penetrating zero domain of icy wind, though more terrible still, he added, was the superhuman effort of the manuscript to provide descriptions of Corstopitum, followed by Gibraltar and Rome, for from this point on beyond the fourth chapter it was no longer a matter of the established practice of minutely cataloguing selected facts and circumstances, but of the ever deeper and ever more intensive exploration of selected facts and circumstances, which the young lady should try imagining, he told her, though what she was listening to with such nervous intensity was not him but to noises outside while he was leafing through a black and white notebook on his lap so that, for example, he noted the chapter began with four mentions of Segedunum, that is the say the mouth of the Tyne, and moved west to the fourth (!) manned passing place, then, from there on to the road that led to Corstopitum, four times in a row, four times the same thing (!), only filling it out every so often with an extra clause or so, but usually just with some adjective or adverb to drive the point home, as if somehow it were four distinct acts of breathing he wanted to describe, and with it of course everything concerning the journey through fog and rain that could be contained in four breaths, and thus repeating four times the experience of traveling the army communication route to the Heavenly Vallum, four times the story of how they changed horses at Condercum, of what first impression Kasser and his companions formed of the Vallum fortifications, of the forests and the military posts along the way, and of how they were stopped six miles before Vindolava where it was only the energetic intervention of the commander of the troop and the providing of a pass by the Praefectus Fabrum that persuaded the centurion in charge of the fort to allow them to continue toward Vindolava, though he could say the same of the Gibraltar episode where the repetition of the descriptions took a different form, such that it kept referring back to the extraordinarily precise picture it had drawn, and by continually keeping that picture in front of the reader it etched the image of the whole ineradicably on his mind, for example how, in the fifth section, it preserved the spectacle witnessed by Kasser and the others when, having reached C
alpe by the mainland route they arrived at an enormous inn with the name of Albergueria and having settled into their rooms there they went downstairs to exchange some money and looked out of the window to catch a first glimpse of the spectral gathering of galleons, frigates and corvettes, naviguelas, caravelles and a variety of hulks below in the fog-bound bay: craft from Venice, Genoa, Castile, Brittany, Algeria, Florence, Vizcaya, Pisa, Lisbon and who knows how many others kinds of vessels in that absolute graveyard stillness, that immediately declared what happens when you get a spell of calma chicha, the sea becalmed, said Korin, among the dangerously narrow, fatal straits of Gibraltar, and this was what confronted the mind of the reader, such an image and other images like it, drawn in lines of ever greater depth, and confronted him too when, between the writing of the fourth and fifth chapters the beginnings of an understanding burst upon him and he realized that this was how he should express the matter, as regards what still remained to understand.
4.
Usually it took about ten minutes or so to warm himself with his own breath, to lock himself in, undo his buttons, sit down and then just breathe and keep breathing until he felt the room beginning to warm a little, taking up position at about five o’clock or quarter past five when he was sure not to be disturbed, for it was too early for the others and he could relax, and what was more, he added much later one evening, this was the only place he could relax, because he needed this half hour in the morning, this security and silence in the landing toilet, and he did in fact sit there about half an hour waiting for the urge, so he had time to gaze and stare, and did indeed take the opportunity for gazing and staring, this being a time before he could actually begin to think, the sort of time when a man sleepily gazes at things, when he truly soaks up everything that meets his gaze, the world before him, and, as they say, he said, even a crack in the wall or the door or the concrete floor becomes intimately familiar to him, so it was no wonder that one morning he noticed that near the top of the wall on his right, a wall that had been tiled from floor to ceiling, one of the tiles was not quite as it should be, that something about it was different from the day before or the day before that, though he didn’t notice that straightaway for while he was sitting with his trousers around his ankles, propping his head on his hands, he was looking down or ahead, at the bolt on the door, not up, and it was only after he had finished and pulled up his trousers that he happened to glance up and saw the change, which, he decided, consisted of the grouting around the tile having been removed, and it was so obvious that the grouting had gone that he couldn’t help seeing it immediately, so he put down the toilet seat and stood on it so he could reach the tile, tapped it and could hear that it was hollow behind, and by carefully pushing at one corner of it succeeded somehow in extracting the tile, behind which—there!—he could see a deeper space had been created and that the space had been filled with little plastic sachets, full, God forbid, of a white powder much like flour, not that he looked too closely or dared open one because he was a little frightened, his first reaction being that it was bad things in there, though to be perfectly honest, as he confessed later, he didn’t know what precisely bad things was, but he knew somehow, by some means, and it was somehow obvious that it was bad, and he didn’t even begin to guess who might have put it there, for it might have been anyone, and the most likely explanation was that was one of the lodgers in the apartment below, so he put the tile back, finished buttoning his trousers, flushed the toilet and quickly returned to his room.
5.
There is an intense relationship between proximate abjects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as far as the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God, said Korin after a long period of meditation, but suddenly didn’t know whether he had said that aloud or only to himself and cleared his throat a few times, then instead of returning to his interrupted story said nothing for a while, hearing only the shuffling of the newspaper as the interpreter’s lover leafed through its pages.
6.
It was Kasser who suffered most from the cold, he said eventually, breaking his silence, from the moment they disembarked from the enormous decareme on the shores of the Tyne, received their horses, were joined by a body of armed escort that had been ordered for them, and set out on the road along the inner edge of the Vallum, and he was so cold that when they arrived at the first military post, garrison said Korin, he had to be lifted off his horse because he was so stiff, he said, that he could no longer feel his limbs or get them to execute his will, and was carried into the fort, sat in front of the fire and two gypsies were summoned to rub his back, his arms and his legs until they set off again, this time toward Condercum, moving on from there too in the same way, through several stops until, on the afternoon of the third day, they reached Corstopitum, that being their destination as well as their starting point according to the Praetorius Fabrum since they were bound to report some time soon on the condition of the Wall, which was why they made a tour of The Immortal Work of the Most Heavenly Caesar, after a good few days of rest of course which were necessary chiefly to allow the vapors of the brigantine medicinal herbs to take effect and cure Kasser’s aches and pains, a treatment he might have been glad of when they arrived at Calpe following the vicissitudes of the journey from Lisbon, which, once again, caused him the most suffering, and it was in fact the figure of Kasser, said Korin with a distant look, Kasser alone of the four of them, that underwent some subtle yet definite transformation, mutation, in the second half of the manuscript, his sensitivity or over-sensitivity, his vulnerability to injuries of various kinds, becoming ever more marked, a fact he mentioned now only because the attention of the others to Kasser became ever more intense, sometimes it being Bengazza, sometimes Toót asking him if “everything was all right” as they traveled on in the coach under the protection of the Prince of Medina, while at other times, at the Albergueria for instance, it was Toót who secretly tried to find some army surgeon, and succeeded in finding one in the “hope of alleviating the strange distress continually afflicting Señor Casser,” explained Korin, shaking his head, in other words, after the fourth chapter there was an imperceptibly increasing, concentration, a matter of delicate emphasis—or nuance, as Korin put it—on Kasser, and this constant concentration cast an anxious shadow even across the first hours of their arrival—for example when they found a space at a table on the crowded ground floor of the Albergueria, and everyone was keeping a wary eye on whether Kasser was eating the food put before him by the landlady, and later, after supper, when they were trying to guess whether he was listening at all to the conversation around him in which a mass of people, each in his own peculiar language, was analyzing the worrying and somewhat nightmarish state of affairs in the bay with its gently rocking but stranded vessels in the thick fog, the hopeless vacuum of the fatally becalmed sea, and, closer to the shores of Gibraltar, the melancholy shades of drifting schooners from Genoa and Venetian galera da mercato, the joints of whose masts gave an occasional muffled shriek as they shifted slightly in the deaf air.
7.
According to the Mandatum of the Praetorius Fabrum they were commanded to inspect the condition of the Glorious Work so as to be able to form an opinion of the value of all that had been done so far, to offer technical advice on the remarkably continuous development and maintenance of the wall, on the human and other resources required for this maintenance, and to form a management committee of ingeniarii with legally binding powers, able to make decisions regarding the organization of time and space, to be set up in Eburacum where the VI Legio Victrix was stationed, though in actual fact, Korin told the interpreter’s lover on the bed, they were being summoned and dispatched simply so they might admire and adore this unique structure, and so that they should declare their astonishment and rapture at the sight, the idea being that the aforesaid astonishment and rapture should strengthen the position of its creators, reassuring, above all, Aulus Platorius Nepost, the current legatu
s of Britannia Romana in distant Londinium, that the masterpiece constructed here was genuinely the most advanced, most glorious, most immortal work that could have been created; and it was clear from the chosen style of the Mandatum, from the ceremonial quality of its language, that this was what was expected of them, nor would they have happily undertaken the terrible overland journey and the even more terrible sea-crossing had they not been assured that the purpose of this great plan of the Most High Lord, the Project, was precisely to inspire such astonishment and rapture, and, it must be said, they were not disappointed, for Hadrian’s Wall, as the simple soldiers referred to it, really did astonish everyone, being greater and different from what they had expected on the basis of what they had heard of it in the form of news or gossip before their arrival, chiefly in its physical substance as it snaked over miles and miles of the bare spine of the Caledonian hills toward its western limit at Ituna aestuarium, bewitching the spectator, including the four of them who after recovering from the ardors of the journey, which in the case of Kasser meant covering himself with a selection of furs from pelt of bear, fox, deer and sheep, walked the line of the Vallum for several weeks, so, yes, they were observers, said Korin, not technical advisers, as described in the markedly official document relating to their mission, and observers too they remained as guests of the Albergueria inn nestling, hidden by the sea, at the foot of Gibraltar, in Calpe, where they were registered as emissaries, vicariouses, of the cartographic council of King John II, though in actual fact it was the bay itself they had come to watch from the upper-story windows, in which bay, according to Falke, they were obliged to pay their respects to the limits, the border, as Korin had it, of the world, and therefore also the limits of certainty, of verifiable propositions, of order and clarity, in other words the border between reality and uncertainty with all the compelling attraction of unverifiable propositions, full of the unquenchable desire for darkness, for impenetrable fogs, for incredible outlandish chances, confronting, in brief, that which lay behind the realm of whatever existed, at the point where the human world had drawn the line of demarcation, added Bengazza, joining the conversation on the second evening, beyond which there exists, as they say, nothing, where, as they say: nothing can be, he declared raising his voice, the raising of his voice betraying for the first time the true purpose of their arrival here, the aim, said Korin, that being to wait here for news of the Great Event, the term referring to something Kasser had mentioned back in Lisbon, and at this point, said Korin, the young lady should know that in this fifth chapter all Christendom, but particularly the kingdoms of John and Isabella, was in a fever of hitherto unknown excitement, as were Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót who, as true disciples and servants of the much respected Prince of Medina-Sidonia, Don Enrique de Guzmán, as well as of the Mathematical Junta of the court of Lisbon, believed that the daring expedition, rejected by John but fervently supported by Isabella was of greater, indeed very much greater significance than anyone could imagine, far more than a simple adventure, for, Toót remarked on their way here, if Señor Colombo’s idiotic venture should achieve its aims, Gibraltar, and with Gibraltar the world, and with the world the notion of anything with limits, and with the end of limits the end of everything known, everything, but everything would come to a stop, declared Toót, for the hidden last term of the conceptual realm, the intellectual distinction set between that which exists and that which does not would vanish, he said, and so the definable and therefore correct, if immeasurable, fixed ratio between the divine and the mortal orders would be lost in the dangerous euphoria of discovery, in the hubris of the search for impossible things, in the loss of respect for a state of being that realizes errors and can therefore reject error, or to put it another way, the fever of fate was succeeded by the intoxication of sobriety, said Kasser, yes, if you looked at it like that, the place, Gibraltar, was of enormous importance, and he gazed through the window, saying, Calpe and the Heights of Abila, and the Gates of Heracles, whispering that places offering views of Nothing would henceforth be confronted by Something, then he fell quiet on this second evening, as did everyone else as they sat and gazed silently, a shadow slowly crossing their faces, and thought of all those ships becalmed, trapped in the bay by the much feared calma chicha, the bay down there in the fog, and the faint shrieks occasionally emitted by the masts of the ships drifting off shore.
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