“Some ice cream?”
She seemed to recall something, gave me a mischievous grin, and burst into speech: “As for ice cream—and I certainly hope you’ll only order the kind that’s made in those old-fashioned molds that come in every possible architectural form—whenever I eat one of those temples, churches, obelisks, or rocks, it’s like a quaint geography I must take a moment to contemplate before transforming the monument of raspberry or vanilla into a refreshing coolness in my throat. My God, it wouldn’t surprise me if you found Vendôme columns made of chocolate or raspberry ice cream at the Ritz, and then you’d need several of those, like votive columns or towers erected along an avenue in celebration of the glory of Coolness. They also have raspberry obelisks that rise here and there in the scorching desert of my thirst, whose pink granite will melt in the back of my mouth to slake me better than any oasis could . . . Those peaks of ice cream at the Ritz sometimes resemble the Monte Rosa, and sometimes, especially when they’re lemon, I don’t mind if they’re not shaped like a monument but are as steep and irregular as a mountain painted by Elstir.”
At last she had spoken. Her voice was still uncertain, but without a doubt she had now cast off her SIREN’S tail. And she’d managed to surprise me with this disquisition extracted from the BIBLIOSPHERE. She knew I would appreciate the care with which she had selected it, the fact that it was by Proust, of whom I’d spoken so frequently. Immediately I remembered that one of KLIMT’S redheaded models was called Albertine (like Proust’s heroine). And delighted by the happy coincidence and because at that moment I saw the waiter approaching from the back of the café with our frozen concoctions, I shouted out in jubilation, “VANILLA ICE.” (Which also happened to be the name of one of my favorite singers that year.)
The waiter was carrying the tray at a dangerous angle, though the glass dishes remained glued to its mirrored surface as if by some prodigy. I intuited that the inclination the waiter was imparting to the tray as he walked between the tables was inversely proportionate to the weight of the cups it bore, and that the waiter’s brain was working like a well-oiled machine, in full mastery of his corporeal organization: the second-to-second disposition of his arm with the napkin draped over it, the suction pads of his right hand that gripped the tray so firmly, and his head which, a moment before the daring spin, announced the angle that both the tray and his torso would assume. Skills, wiles, acquired over years of intense rowing across the sea of clients, yet of which his waiter brain had not the slightest awareness. LINDA, to my astonishment, had given signs of possessing a more refined mechanism, capable of registering concepts, whole passages, such as the one she had just declaimed. I had tried to provide her with a guide to this apprenticeship, one of such logical force and powerful conviction that it would render the truth of frivolity irresistible, mathematically deducible, without need of any act of faith. Now I was ready to put her to the test, determine the degree of humanity that LINDA had achieved after three weeks of intense apprenticeship, attempt an operational definition of her intelligence (or humanity).
(In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” A. M. Turing proposes the following:
[T]he “imitation game” . . . is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”
I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to program computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
Which is to say: [This game] is played with three [participants], [the machine] (A), [a human] (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the [human] and which is the [machine]. . . . It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification [so A, naturally, will answer without any kind of limitation]. . . . In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. [ . . . ] The best strategy for B is . . . to give truthful answers. . . . [If] an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning [most people will agree that the machine has demonstrated intelligent conduct].
Had she shed her SIREN’S tail? How stable was she on her new legs? Was she ready for the CATWALK? Was it Anastasia or LINDA standing before me, her memory cells full of newly renovated information?
VASARI. The existence of important galleries of art in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy conditions the appearance of a certain sort of perfectly mimetic being: girls with an intellectual air about them, glasses, stockings that end above the knee, a slim portfolio clutched against the bosom as if replete with poetical compositions. During one whole summer I was intrigued by the frequent appearance of a woman beneath my window who would walk past with all the imposing presence of a condottiere depicted in oil paint. It took me two months to identify her as a fruit seller at a nearby bazaar, a coarse and ill-tempered creature. On another occasion I found myself in the cafeteria of a large research institution and noticed, among the members of the public present there alongside me, a gentleman with just the sort of precisely trimmed beard that is worn by a physicist who does top-secret research (atomic bombs, military lasers). The movement of his right hand through the air resolved all questions with academic exactitude, giving particular emphasis to certain phrases. I imagined: “The half-life of U-235 worries me,” or “We must use the positron accelerator to bombard the nucleus with gamma particles.” When I walked past him on my way out the door, I heard him confess the truth: “I’m telling you one more time: no yeast at all! None! A ten-liter demijohn, some cherries, and some sugar. That’s it!” Later I often saw him in a neighboring bar tossing back glasses of cheap rosé, gripped with the firm hand of the lathe operator that he was.
I. The organizing eye. (In the Confessions of Saint Augustine [Book X], this important clarification:
Ad oculos enim proprie videre pertinet, utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus, cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus. Neque enim dicimus, ‘audi quid rutilet,’ aut, ‘olefac quam niteat,’ aut, ‘gusta quam splendeat,’ aut, ‘palpa quam fulgeat’: videri enim dicuntur haec omnia. Dicimus autem non solum, ‘vide quid luceat,’ quod soli oculi sentire possunt, sed etiam, `vide quid sonet,’ ‘vide quid oleat,’ ‘vide quid sapiat,’ ‘vide quam durum sit.’ Ideoque generalis experientia sensuum concupiscentia (sicut dictum est) oculorum vocatur, quia videndi officium, in quo primatum oculi tenent, etiam ceteri sensus sibi de similitudine usurpant, cum aliquid cognitionis explorant.
For seeing belongeth properly to the eyes; yet we apply this word to the other senses also, when we exercise them in the search after knowledge. For we do not say, “listen how it glows,” “smell how it glistens,” “taste how it s
hines,” or “feel how it flashes,” since all of these are said to be seen. And yet we say not only, “see how it shineth,” which the eyes alone can perceive; but also, “see how it soundeth,” “see how it smelleth,” “see how it tasteth,” “see how hard it is.” And thus the general experience of the senses, as was said before, is termed “the lust of the eyes,” because the function of seeing, wherein the eyes hold the preeminence, the other senses by way of similitude take possession of, whensoever they seek out any knowledge. —Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.)
II. I could never explain to myself the strange fascination that particular painting exerted on me, the strong attraction of the interlaced fingers, the languor of the powerful arms, captured in a relaxed and almost feminine pose. I’d discovered him at the end of the gallery, poised atop his lunar landscape like a rare species of lepidoptera, a gigantic Vanessa atalanta. His sadness, the blue marble of the landscape, those crystalline blooms, spoke to me of an ascent to a distant star: the exhausting journey, an extremely long effort rendered futile by the lunar desolation. They told me in the museum—or maybe I read it somewhere—that he represented a dejected or defeated demon. Was he the victor in full ascent or the victim of a fall? Unable to resolve the enigma I bought the best reproduction available—the one with dimensions closest to the original’s immensity—and hung at the foot of my bed.
In the morning, as I emerged from long dreams, I would open my eyes in the room’s semipenumbra and was invariably surprised by the presence of the daemon there. His coffee-colored torso and curling mane, the greens and blacks of that landscape, always posed the same question. Was this a lofty victory, though with no air to breathe in the void that surrounded him, or was he back on the earth, downcast, unable to break away from the pull of its formidable mass? One morning I leapt out of bed and without looking even once into his eyes went to the bathroom for my Solingen straight razor and resolved the question in the best way possible. The sad eyes, the weight of disgrace, the lunar despair—all that was rolled up and stowed away on top of the bookshelf. I cut out the bloom of octahedrons to his left and had it framed, a fragment of the most exquisite mineralogical exuberance. This painting, I decided, was far more suggestive than the other one, and for years, as I contemplated these unfathomable gems, entranced, I grew more convinced that this was the true and only contribution of Bruvel, the mad painter, to my formation: the human (in the old sense of concern for the human) was absolutely unnecessary. I was entirely wrong about this, I could not have been more wrong. As we shall see.
VIEW OF FALLING SNOW. It had been snowing since ten that morning. I asked the male nurse for a TEA and sipped it slowly without taking my eyes from the window, surrendering myself to the hypnotic power of the light snow that, agitated by the wind, seemed to ascend in inverse sequence, upward toward the distant floodgates of the heavens.
For the silence of this hospital room, for my legs encased in plaster, and for the depth of the sky, I had Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, wounded at the Battle of Borodino: the unbearable splendor of our cosmic insignificance. The obvious existence of a baleful God who, with a single slash, had severed all the delicate threads of my story. Which of the two bodies touched the striped awning first? The small packet that was P.O.A. or my own eighty kilos of weight?
Downward: “A long way down since the time you had everything,” which was another idea for a title, perhaps a more precise one. How long does it take a snowflake to fall from the sky? A month and a half? Two months?
When I awoke it had stopped snowing and I learned that I’d been here for sixty days. I also discovered a woman I did not know next to my bed. A young woman with hard features, her hair cut in layers at the back of the neck. It was LINDA. By now I could reach this type of conclusion very quickly. But her face was worked in shades of gray, as if bleached. Only the green of a pair of very expensive emerald earrings stood out, earrings I didn’t recall having seen her wear before.
“They cut off my ponytail,” I explained.
She turned to display her own bare nape.
I said, “I almost can’t see, Anastasia. Because of the fall, apparently. I haven’t suffered any attacks since I’ve been here. But why has it taken so long for you to come? Where have you been all this time?”
“I’m leaving, THELONIOUS.”
“Dear God, no. Call me José, JOSEPH, if you want.”
“Well, I’m going to New York, JOSEPH.”
“Speak Russian, Anastasia, for the love of God. Don’t you understand? I was one step away from death. And what’s more olvídalo (in the clear sense of forget about that). There’s nothing in the OCCIDENT either. I’ll explain this to you in detail if you like. A voice whispered in my ear and I heard it very clearly, as I’m hearing you now. I wept in rage, thinking about how to proceed with our journey, get more money. I was never that rich, I lied to you, all those stories about Chinese merchandise and chartered cargo ships . . . but a young boy’s voice said to me, in a whisper ‘A long way down since the time you had everything.’ It was like being kicked in the head. It’s a lengthier title than BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL, but even more apt.”
“No. I knew you were right when I saw you stretched out on the awning.”
“But I didn’t see anything as I was falling. I thought I would have time to study the trigonometric increment of the lines, but I didn’t see anything. Only the final impact. That’s what awaits us. I was impatient to tell you.”
“That’s ridiculous, THELONIOUS. What about As I Lay Falling? I could find two or three other good titles . . .” LINDA suddenly broke off and raised her palms to her temples.
“Are your temples throbbing?”
“Yes . . . No . . . Look . . .” she went on. “Aren’t your striped pajamas the same pattern as the fabric of that awning? Weren’t you trying to make me see precisely that sort of thing? As if when you fell . . .”
“My God, you’re right! I hadn’t noticed it.”
“. . . you became organically integrated into its pattern. Seeing you down there with your arms outstretched, like a starfish against the rippling seabed, I understood everything. It was a very eloquent ending. I thought you’d arranged it all. Even if you didn’t, you should thank RUDI for it.”
“But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam.”
(But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam. Anastasia was making the same mistake as everyone else in Muscovy. A momentary and foreseeable error. There were many worlds within frivolity. I had tried to expand the perception she had of her beautiful little boots, to segment them into the fifteen lacquered nesting dolls of their softness, their texture, their pretty silver buckles, et cetera, although—I now saw with absolute clarity—it had been naive of me to anticipate that Anastasia would develop in that direction. In reality, she would never succeed in living in both worlds (that of heightened vision and that of the most sublime frivolity) with the requisite intensity or abandon. The boots she was wearing, so comfortable, polished with such great skill, did not touch her soul. She would never paddle happily in the sea where I’d moved with such ease. The time when I interrupted her dissertation on ice cream, shouting VANILLA ICE in jubilation—which was not the flavor that the waiter was bringing us but the joy I felt at being able to bring together, in my novel, the name of that rapper with a passage taken from Proust—she was left in a state of utmost incomprehension, and since I could provide no satisfactory clarification of the reasons for my happiness, she came to believe that I’d shouted VANILLA ICE because his music interested me as much as THELONIOUS’S did and that these two artists’ respective achievements allowed for some element of equivalence. I mean that it cost her a great deal of effort to discern what was present, what was rapidly taking place before her eyes, and though I had confidence that a woman of her talents would succeed in doing so at some point in the future, the most I could boast of, in the specific case of LINDA, was my success in making her adopt a lighter outlook on life, one that overloo
ked all the duties she’d always thought it necessary to carry out. You’ll tell me that she was an atypical case, out of sync with the times, someone into whom the Doctrine and its central theses had sunk deep roots. Agreed. In essence, this was the cause of her current decision. She had come very far, though without undergoing any radical change. She’d suddenly begun to abhor her gray former life and was dreaming of a career as a model. She was going to New York.)
“Or wherever. To leave Russia.”
“Kolia told me he’d like to go into the forest and never return. A day like today, with a HARD FROST, so that the snow covers his tracks. He’s been talking about this all morning. He says he would lie down on a fallen cedar and let himself die of the cold, you know? Like those poor BRODIAGAS we saw in the south. He also told me that when people leave the north they carry the bodies of their dead away with them. The permaFROST keeps them intact.”
“Wait,” LINDA interrupted me, visibly upset. She stood up, almost knocking the chair over. “I’ll bring you some water.”
Five minutes later I heard a car engine roar to life beneath the window. It was true: she was going to New York. By way of good-bye she’d said, “Wait,” clearly in the sense of my own summer sermons. I wept. I’m not ashamed to confess it. Tears rolled down my cheeks, uncontrollably. (Then, on the chair, I found a little bit of the LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS, the video of our fateful CATWALK.)
When we switched on the TV the next morning we learned of the fall of the IMPERIUM. I felt no emotion whatsoever. I merely noted that Mikhail Sergeyevich, the last emperor, had sent us a message that was full of meaning (apparently he, too, was in on the secret of FLUORIDE). The following is, undoubtedly, a fact of general interest, and I mention it here so that it may pass into history: The last emperor met with a rock band (a very bad one, the Scorpions) hours before reading his resignation speech on television. A most astute gesture on his part, no doubt.
Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Page 16