We often say “love” to justify such madness, to give it an acceptable face, to give it back to the concrete daily life from which it can only escape. “Love” is the word invented to name a hole punched in reality. But we do not know the love of others, we know others only through the love we make with them, never through its green kernel, because it belongs to them. “Love” is not the word I’m looking for.
I may perhaps be looking for your name, different from the one you were christened. The name of your quiet strength, of your fragility, of the closed kingdom where they speak language of beasts. I am looking for the new name for the self I lost along the way just as I had finally grasped the slippery edge of my soul, and was imprinting my odour in the memory of your dogs.
I have nothing but writing to help me try to invent a word that won’t exist but that eventually, as after an eclipse, would shed its light on the road we grope along at night, so close to the sky. I was the outstretched horizon a child runs towards, arms flung open, and then, broken, a fragment of a return to the familiar country, to my mother tongue and the grey duty of days that are all alike.
I still have no comprehension of what happened. If I could find the word I’m looking for I might be able to separate you from the source of all joy.
The western world once spent a summer glued to its TV to follow the story of a child who’d fallen into an artesian well. This was in the early 1980s, it was headline news in all the papers. For days, they tried desperately to get the child out. Finally he died — of starvation, thirst, cold, and fear.
I played outside, thinking about him all day, thinking about his legs wedged in the well. I might even have prayed to the good Lord for him once or twice before I fell asleep, just in case. I grew up. Often, for no reason, I thought about him, thought again about his fear and about how slowly death had crept to him.
I found out recently that all this happened a few kilometres from your village.
In your mother’s house the TV was always on, and when I glanced at it there was nothing but blood and bottle-blondes.You were the king of the remote control.You’d adjust the volume, switch channels, and tell us to be quiet when some news item interested you. On one exceptional night, I took the control. An American movie had just started. It began with a mother and her three children playing in an ordinary suburban backyard.The phone rings.The mother answers. When she returns the swing is swaying back and forth and there are only two children. The mother calls to her youngest, who doesn’t reply. She calls again, her voice more and more anxious.Then she looks at the other two who are standing, dismayed, in front of a pipe that’s planted in the ground. She gives them a questioning look, not daring to voice the burning question. They look back at her, pathetic, not daring to express the absurd reply to her unspeakable question.The mother bends over the well and calls again. From down below comes a moan, a sob, the feeble, hollow voice of oblivion.
The baby has fallen down the hole.
The film was inspired by a true event, something that happened in the United States and therefore has a happy ending. It takes several days to get the child out of the well.The channel is too narrow for an adult. It’s a baby-sized hole. A parallel well is dug.The stone is unyielding. A geologist is brought in, who uses stainless steel drill bits, advancing a few centimetres an hour.The tension is extreme, the child is dehydrated, the mother is comatose, the father wants to beat up the entire world. People crowd around the tragedy, dozens of individuals come to suggest solutions for this never-before-seen problem, they dig, dig, men come back out of the hole half-asphyxiated, their skin grey.They heat the well, the nights are cool, a mike is sent down to keep track of the child’s heartbeats, her mother sings songs to her, if she falls asleep even for a moment, there’s panic.
I was glued to the TV and your mother, amazed at my sudden interest, watched me watching the movie. In the end, the baby is saved, the crowd applauds, the ambulance takes off, the music explodes: this is America.
That night I let you sleep alone and I walked back to the empty house.
We are interested in mysteries, we would like to see what isn’t shown, we’d like to know what can’t be known. First, we study philosophy, which goes on for a few years, then, with no idea of what to do, we become aware of the silence of books.We allow ourselves to be called by obscurities more obscure than those of language, we try to find them among the desire of skins and cosmic cycles.We’re fascinated by disappearance, the disappearance of objects and of our own selves, the disappearance of daylight.We dig.After all, it’s to find water that we dig wells.We pass through a canal to be born and so we try to find a canal where we can repeat that act, one that will renew us; we glide into the well expecting we’ll be able to get out, but we remain stuck there, and suddenly the expected birth has a terrible similarity to death.
I was ashamed of my body in your overly narrow streets. I had packed in my suitcase lightheartedness, curiosity, enough strength to part with everything; but none of that would have sufficed without blindness. Blindness and the terrible beauty of blindness, the dream of being happy and blind, happy as a blind person, miraculously refreshed by the opacity of your universe, resolute, complete, squeezed between your lake and its hill. I dreamed of freedom from the exhausting responsibility to clearly distinguish one thing from another, and to decide at all times which was good and which bad. And that’s how we fall down a well, I think, it’s fairly simple, once you’ve broken with the day and made a deal with the darkness of the poor verb “to love.”
In September I extended my courage to take better advantage of your country’s light. It was a light like gold bullion, I remember it had the exact temperature of the body, and by circulating inside it one felt omniscient. I knew though that I was going to leave, that the time foreseen in advance, foreseen from the beginning, would arrive. I was alone in that story, which would end the way it had started — fabulous and sad, with veins like the veins in marble and in the migration of birds.The wind lengthened the street in early evening, made it Gothic, there was a smell of fire, and its way of clouding the distance; it was your autumn, I had to wear a scarf and a jacket, at night you pulled the blanket over us. I stepped into your autumn, fascinated, and the lake was higher and higher and the sky full, and full like the sky were the hunters’ rifles; I understood that your autumn wasn’t mine and that, as I was stepping into it with surprise, I was all the more foreign to it. Every day, I was refused facts that should come on their own, of no interest to you but brand-new to me: that light, for example, and that wind. I entered without entering among you. Everything told me, laughing: farewell, already. Caressing you, I placed upon you airport and suitcases, your desire left on the shelf and my memory haunted by the weeds in the lake. I stepped into your autumn, it was one more moment that knit us together, the final moment before my own white winter, and then all winters — in another country. In that country, mine, which would no longer be mine absolutely, which would simply be just one more country, a country to live one’s life in, a life like any other, a life without yours.
And so before I boarded the plane, I decided to try at least once to take another trip. I left for Assisi and as soon as the train started up, I realized that I was intact, really, that I was myself, that I was able to step outside the perfect circle.
Assisi is a rose-coloured town where the sun becomes a great mystic strolling along walls and steeples.White passages rise between houses, blue vines drop from the roofs, delinquent fountains of coolness hide in shady corners.The eye is suddenly naked, as if it were new, it is the round eye of the newborn gazing at a world not yet touched by evil. In Assisi there soars, suspended, the possibility that God exists.
Access to the Basilica of St. Francis is by a kind of ramp that blends into the city walls and from the top of which one looks out onto the dusty plain. During the thirteenth century the Basilica, built to the glory of Francis recognized by the Church, had been the subject of a controversy between those who wanted something
grandiose and those who endorsed Franciscan asceticism.The two were reconciled by erecting a vast, elevated basilica and under it, a squat crypt devoted to the worship of the holy remains.
In the upper basilica, Giotto painted the famous cycle that recounts the life of Francis ad infinitum. His blue is different from anyone else’s, similar perhaps to that of a pair of scissors we had as a child and later on lost, along with the pleasure of our Sunday games. Around the characters, architectures whose groping perspective is reaching for the Renaissance without losing its medieval naïveté — they are talking, leaning towards people’s gazes, all gazes; those of visitors and those of Francis himself, of his friends, of the pope. Sometimes they stay balanced in the hand of a single man.
Behind Giotto, in the transept, his master, Cimabue, is dying. The frescoes now have no colours but those of the earth, they are on their way to the place of their own origins. They expose, shamelessly, human ambition, they prefigure the painter’s own lingering death, its subjectivity hanging on the wall like a respirator, but still beseeching, still celebrating, still.The still soul of Cimabue. Furtively, Marianne snaps a couple of photos when the guard’s back is turned. She is well aware that she should let time pass even over fragile things and protect them no more than a maple tree in autumn.
The small basilica is low. Display cases hold Francis’s clothing, starched and mended — his sandals, his nightdress — ridiculous without him, without his charisma and his passion. The dead should be allowed to die, the frescoes to withdraw, we should inhabit as best we can without trying to possess.
From the first night, in a sense, I was quite certain that all times are in fact a single time, round and full, and that I would travel forever down the muddy dirt road, with your face on my left, the storm in the windshield, and that strange smile which seemed to say thank you, but also: I’ve always known that you would come to me. You drove eternity like a nail into ordinary time. I had the impression I was opening my consciousness with forceps in order to make it capable of a fourth dimension wherein we would be eternal. I had the impression that what I was opening had always existed, that I had simply understood a phenomenon that’s never explained to us because it is inexplicable, one to which perhaps only spirits drifting towards a last resort gain access. I understood that not only is eternity possible but that it has long since arrived on its own, open for us in advance like a big house where the door hinges don’t even creak, are always new and oiled, always ready to move.
What I understood about time was also a form of serenity, a sublime form of serenity, a reconciliation not only promised but already sealed, for a long time, forever. Patience, an art I’d been absorbed in mastering for such a long time, suddenly struck me as useless; it only served to project into the future something that was already present and, at the end of the day, despite its good offices, we finally miss out on everything. On the very first night, the car drove into the storm and instead of being afraid, I was not afraid.
The assurance of eternity: I should be able to choose it over nostalgia, but also over hope.
Long afterwards, later, now, once I was back in my slowly moving winter, with its sky higher than others and its ever-present crackling and creaking, I also understood that not only was I still on the dirt road, but that I was all the more present there, as my calendar moves away from that date, as events continue to happen and to happen elsewhere, as if to the exact degree that the passing of time invalidates eternity, eternity is somehow deepened. It’s a strange paradox, a paradox similar to your strange smile — and strangely enough, I’m no longer suffering at all, I’ve decided to take everything on board: you alive, you erased and myself alive in the thought of you and in other thoughts, in the thoughts that pass and then come back — or not.
I’m not talking about memory. Memory I also have, sharp, precise, with the breath of the wet countryside, the muffled sound of tires in the mud and that of the engine that was always threatening to break down. Memory is a trace of the past, it is present as representation. When we try to relive an experience by gathering together all its components, even if it’s just to see a film again, we are always disappointed, because the component that has become memory will never be given back. Memory is flat, thin, fragile, it is under construction and in the process of disintegrating; memory is banal because it is just a product of our mind, and our mind is always poor. Memory is like the Signorelli fresco in the last chapel on the right in the Duomo of Orvieto.To see it at close range, I climbed onto the scaffolding; work was underway at great expenditure of gold leaf to prevent the fresco from disappearing. Inside its new skin, though, it was disappearing, it was settling into the stone of the walls, but that, they never mention. Recollection is something like that scaffolding, memory is like the restored fresco: it’s the new skin applied to the past in order to bear its disappearance which is always, in the end, our own. I like memories, but I fear illusion.
Eternity is not like memory. Eternity is the fact that once a fresco has been sunk into the wall and once the wall has eroded to the ground, it is still intact and close to me, despite my ignorance of them, despite my absence. Eternity has no need of me, yet I am part of it all the same. Eternity contains the gulags, the death camps, the Academy of Athens, the Etruscan necropoli, it holds prehistoric fingermarks, the American flag planted on the moon, your birth and your first tooth; it holds my sister, who is crying because she thinks her hair is too short when she catches her reflection in a car window while my mother is clasping her hand on the way home from the hairdresser; it holds my brother, who is changing a diaper, it holds my father, who is looking for wood to carve: we are all there, the dead and the living of all times and all ways of being; your mother was born, she lived, and she will die inside the village perimeter, I want to travel around the planet, that hardly matters in the face of the fact of existing and, especially, in the face of the fact that within our own existence there is everyone else’s. And that which we no longer are and that which we have not yet become, we are already.
She’s sitting in a bar and would like to write to someone, she hasn’t yet decided to whom; the paper is in position, already a little stained with coffee and a roll.A man is looking at her, as other men do, but unlike the others he comes up to her and bends over to ask in English: “Are you a writer?” He has on a white hat beneath which his black eyes glisten like the back of a cricket.
“Not really,” she replies.
“Maybe you will be some day.” He pulls out a chair and sits down.
“We’ll see.”
“Are you travelling on your own?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.Where do you come from? Germany?”
“From Quebec.”
“From what?”
“Canada.”
“Ah! America! I went to New York once. It’s wonderful, New York. I love cities. Do you work?”
“Very little.”
“You watch people.”
“That’s right.”
“If you’re a writer, you know, looking around you is a full-time job.”
“Are you a writer?”
“Yes. Do you read a lot?”
“Yes.”
“What do you read?”
“Whatever.”
“Do you like tragedy?”
“A lot.”
“Do you think it resembles you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Comedy’s better.”
“Maybe.”
“Love tragedy, but choose comedy.”
She bursts out laughing. The men at the next table turn around and prick up their ears.They don’t understand English (“What language are they talking?” “German, I think.” “Ah, yes, I recognize it now.”) but they’re listening attentively. One of them, thin and stooped, sends Marianne suspicious little signs.
“What’s your name?”
“Marianne.”
“I’m Angelo. Do you like to travel?”
“A lot.
”
“Good. And you like to write.”
“Yes.”
“You ought to live in your own house, you know.”
“That’s not easy.”
“No. A person has to find their own house and live in it, but keep a window open to let in the world.”
Marianne doesn’t reply. She’s looking at Angelo. Suddenly, behind the brim of his hat, she catches a glimpse of his wings, transparent. Angelo realizes that she has seen them and he smiles as well. New suspicious signs from the man at the next table.
“Remember, now,” says Angelo. “Choose comedy and don’t forget the window.”
Marianne puts away her paper scattered with the crumbs and with Angelo’s words, words as white as the backs of crickets. She gets up, pays for her breakfast and Angelo’s coffee, which he lets her do while the bartender looks on, incredulous.
Angelo leaves. The man at the next table steps up and cranes his neck towards Marianne so that the ligaments stand out: “Not talk with him, is crazy, crazy,” he declares sententiously.
“Grazie del consiglio,” she replies. He smiles at her and retracts his neck, satisfied with the impact of his intervention. She picks up her purse and leaves. On the street the wind of Assisi is blowing and, as soon as she’s out the door, Marianne feels the newborn feathers of her wings moving on her back.
She runs into Angelo a few hours later; he’s busy writing on a typewriter as he sits astride the wall of the fortress, he is writing in the open air, the way the Impressionists painted, and she doesn’t stop to say hello because he seems to be absorbed, but even more because she assumes he won’t recognize her.That he was intended to pass by her only once, a light above that of the day, just one time to moisten her wings and give them, as we do to a swing, the push they need.
The Perfect Circle Page 13