Máscaras venecianas (part 3)

The third part to the Bioy Casares story ("Venetian Masks").  You can read the original in this collection.

Of course, I no longer remembered a thing about the costume competition; thinking of Daniela and the emotion of seeing her were my sole preoccupations.  Now and then in painful stabs my conscience felt what was at stake at our meeting.  After all my suffering I was about to revive pain that had, if not vanished, then fallen silent.  Did I nourish any illusions of finding a way – soon, in an opera box, at an opera gala – to win back Daniela?  Would I do that to Massey?  Why was I pondering a possibility that did not exist ... It was clear that the expectation of seeing Daniela was enough to cast the die.

When I arrived the gala had already begun.  An usher guided me to the box located in one of those so-called balconies.  As I opened the door the first thing I saw was Daniela, wearing a domino and eating chocolate; at her side was Massey.  Daniela smiled at me and behind her mask – which she didn't remove as I would have wanted – her eyes gleamed.  She whispered to me:

"Pull up a chair."

"I'm fine here," I said.

So as not to make a sound I sat in the first seat I could find.

"You won't be able to see anything from there," said Massey.

I was perturbed.  My happiness changed to tacit annoyance at Massey's presence in the box.  A soprano began to sing:

Vieni, deh, vieni

And Daniela, as if fascinated, turned her attention towards the stage and her back to me.  Doubtless unjustly, I felt that the woman of my life, after an interminable separation, had given (I believe the right word here is lent) me her attention for less than a minute.  The most extraordinary thing about this, perhaps the saddest as well, was that I reacted with indifference.  I felt so distant that I was able to learn about the luckless loves of Ana, Walter and Lorelei, who out of spite and with the aim of obtaining  magic powers married a river (the Rhine, if I'm not mistaken).  Initially the only similarity I perceived in the story that was developing and my own tale was that each involved three people; I needed nothing more to follow the performance with any great interest.  At times, true enough, I wallowed in my uncertainty ... I found myself in a unforeseen and shocking situation: Daniela and I were looking at each other like strangers.  Even worse, I wanted to leave.  At intermission Daniela asked:

"Who is the angel who's going to bring me chocolates like these?  They sell them here out front, in the bar of the piazza."

"I'll get them," I hastened to answer.

With disgust I heard Massey's voice declare:

"I'll go with you."

Surrounded by masks and men in formal wear, we slowly descended the marble staircase.  We took off running as we left the theater because out on the square it was very cold.  In the bar Massey chose a table against the door.  Then a girl dressed as an old woman in a crinoline, a "noble" and a "Turk" all came in.  Lost in cheerful banter, they stayed near the open door.

"This draft is getting to me," I said.  "Let's change tables."

We moved to a table at the back.  Then they took our order: a strega for me, coffee for Massey, and, of course, the chocolates.  We hardly spoke at all, as if there were only one topic of conversation and it was forbidden.  When we getting ready to pay there were no unoccupied tables; no matter how many times we called them the waiters kept walking by.  The cold had brought quite a few customers.  Suddenly amidst the rumble of conversation an unmistakeable voice could be heard in all clarity, and the two of us looked over towards the front door.  I don't know why it seemed that we hesitated ever so slightly as if each of us sensed the surprise of the other.  At our original table (others had been placed next to it and pushed together), I saw harlequins, columbinas, and two or three dominos.  Then I knew which one was Daniela.  The gleam in her eyes looking at me through the mask left no room for doubt.

Visibly nervous, Massey consulted his watch and said:

"It's about to start."  Mentally I begged him not to insist on his story about not getting in if we don't arrive on time.  And what he did say annoyed me even more: "Wait for me in the box."

"What is he thinking getting rid of me just because Daniela came?"  I thought, indignant.  A moment later I reconsidered:  everyone sees matters in his own way and perhaps Massey felt he was acting completely within his rights since he married her after I had let her go.

I said:

"I'll bring her the chocolates."

He gave them to me hesitantly as if my request had bothered him.

Once I got to her table, Daniela looked me in the eye and whispered:

"This time tomorrow, same place."

She also said another word, a pet name which only she knew.  In an aura of happiness I left the bar.  It was if a veil had been lifted and I asked myself why it took me so long to comprehend that Daniela had only pretended to be distant in the opera box.  I immediately discovered that I hadn't given her the chocolates and was about to turn around when I realized that reappearing with them in hand might lend a ridiculous flourish to what had been a marvelous moment.  Of one thing, however, I was sure: it was far too cold for me to hang around the piazza.  At La Fenice I went straight for our box.  I didn't dare look at Daniela, seated as she had been before, her elbows on the red velvet of the banister.  One might say that in all this time she hadn't changed positions.  I managed to pass her the chocolates but in reality I was rather bewildered.  A suspicion, a stupid hunch – I remembered that Massey that morning had said "my wife" and not "Daniela" – immediately made me ask her to remove her mask.  To soothe my worried mind, I began to concentrate on the movements of her hands, which first drifted back towards the hood of the domino and then right away straightened her somewhat tussled hair.  How I missed those days!  She didn't need to remove her mask, I thought, because only she possessed such grace.  I tried to dissuade her, but soon enough there was Daniela, her face uncovered.  Even though I had always remembered her as incomparable, as unique, the perfection of her beauty dazzled me.  I whispered her name.

I soon regretted having done so.  Something odd had happened: that word, so dear, so darling, here at this time, made me very sad.  The world had become incomprehensible to me.  Amidst the confusion I had a second hunch which provoked true displeasure: "Twins?"  And so, as if I had discerned a suspicion and wanted to explain it like before, I stood up very carefully so that they wouldn't hear me slip out into the hall.  At the door I wondered whether I wasn't wrong, whether I wasn't behaving badly with Daniela.  I turned and whispered:

"I'll be back."

I ran through the horseshoe-shaped gallery which surrounded the boxes.  At the precise moment in which I was hurrying down the stairs I spotted Massey slowly going up, and I hid behind a group of masks.  Had I been asked what I was doing there I could not have possibly come up with an acceptable response; perhaps my presence remained unnoticed.  Before Massey reached the box entrance, I stepped out from behind the masks and ran downstairs.  Like someone throwing himself into icy waters, I went out onto the piazza.  Arriving at the bar I noticed that now there were fewer people and that Daniela's seat was empty.  I spoke with the girl disguised in a domino.

"She just left, with Massey," she said, and must have noticed my confusion because she then added thoughtfully: "She can't have gotten far.  Perhaps you can catch up to her on the street Delle Veste."

I took on the search resolved to overcome all possible difficulties and find her again.  Since I was healthy, I was able to contort my will to this one purpose.  It was probably the unshakeable anxiety of getting Daniela back, the real Daniela, as well as an impulse to prove that I loved her and that, if I left her once, it was not owing to a lack of love.  To prove all that to Daniela and the world.  At the second street I turned right; I had the feeling that everyone was turning right with me.  I felt pain, a blow that choked the air from my throat: it was the cold.  I have discovered that whenever I recall my illness I actually fall sick; so as to think of something else I told myself that we were not as brave as the Venetians: natives of Buenos Aires did not roam the streets on a night like this.  I tried to reconcile the need to accelerate my pace with the need to look attentively all around.  As much as possible, I had to scrutinize women in black, and of course, women in dominos.  Before a church I was sure I recognized her; when I got closer, however, I found another person.  The disappointment produced in me physical discomfort and unease.  "I can't lose my head," I told myself.  So as not to lose my nerve, I thought that it was funny that I literally expressed what I felt without even wanting to do so.  As it were, I maintained my balance with great difficulty.

Máscaras venecianas (part 2)

The second part to the Bioy Casares story ("Venetian Masks").  You can read the original in this collection.

Neither one of them returned to Buenos Aires.  As for my recovery (one of many) – that turned out to be all an illusion, and I continued dragging out my life, my fever attacks alternating with coveted periods of convalescence.

And the years went by quickly; perhaps I should say I didn't feel them.  No fewer than ten years past, dragged out by the rapid repetition of almost identical weeks.  Nevertheless, two facts tested the reality of time: a new improvement in my health – I understood it to be the improvement I had been waiting for – and a new attempt by Massey and Daniela to live together.  I had already spent so many months without a fever that I began to ask myself whether I was healthy.  Massey and Daniela had been separated for so many years that the news of their getting back together surprised me. 

To consolidate my recovery I thought I should break from both my routine and my past.  Perhaps a trip to Europe was the best solution.

I went to see my doctor.  For a long time I mulled over how I should tell him about my plans, what phrasing I should use; I didn't want to give him any opportunity to object.  In reality I was afraid that he would talk me out of it for good or bad reasons.

Without raising his eyes from my medical files, he muttered:

"I think that's an excellent idea."

He looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but the ring of the telephone distracted him.  He had a rather long conversation; meanwhile, I recalled with some apprehension that during my first visit here I had regarded this office as part of a bad dream and the doctor as my enemy (which seemed incredible now).  Remembering all this made me feel very secure, but then other questions arose which alarmed me.  What might he have wanted to say?  Could I really swear that his words were "an excellent idea"?  And if they were indeed, couldn't he have intended them to be ironic?  My anxiety came to a halt when he ended his conversation and explained:

"The spiritual part of you is important in its own right.  A trip now to Europe will be better for you than all the medication I could prescribe."

An array of circumstances, the most important of which being a temporary strengthening of our peso, allowed me to take this trip.  It seemed like destiny was on my side.

I thought that the pleasure of staying indefinitely in almost any part of the world would prevent me from falling into the typical, agency-promoted itinerary: two days in Paris, one night in Nice, lunch in Genoa, and so forth.  Yet a certain impatience similar to that of someone fleeing or desperately in search of something (so that, perhaps, my illness might not catch up to me?) obliged me to reset my trip the next day and visit the most pleasant destinations possible.  In almost absurd haste I went on until one evening in December when, floating through a Venetian canal in a gondola (now I ask myself whether it wasn't a launch stuffed with tourists ... oh, what does it matter!), I found myself in a state of mind in which exaltation and peace combined in perfect harmony.  I heard myself say:

"I'm staying here.  This is what I was looking for."

I disembarked at the Hotel Mocenigo where I had reserved a room.  I remember that I slept well, anxious for the day to come so that I could get up and wander through Venice.  Suddenly it seemed that a faint light was framing my window.  I leapt out of bed, rushed over to the sill, and leaned out.  The dawn was resplendent in its glow over the Grand Canal and the shadows of the Rialto.  Then a damp chill forced me to shut the window and take refuge under my blankets.

Once I had warmed up again, I jumped out of bed.  After a light breakfast I took a steaming hot bath and with no further delay went out to explore the city.  For a moment I thought I was in a dream; no, it was even stranger than that.  I knew that I was not dreaming and yet I could not explain what I was seeing.  "Everything will be explained in due time," I said with nothing more than mild assurance because I remained perplexed.  While two or three gondolas tried to draw my attention with shouts and gestures, a harlequin was moving away in a launch.  Resolved, I still don't know quite why, not to reveal my apprehensions, I asked one of the men rather indifferently how much a trip to the Rialto would cost and boarded a gondola with a hesitant step.  We set off in the opposite direction to that of the mask.  Gazing at the palaces on both sides of the canal I thought: "It would appear that Venice was erected as an interminable series of stages, but why is the first thing I see when I leave my hotel a harlequin?  Perhaps to convince me that this is indeed a theater and subjugate me even more to its whims.   It's quite clear that if I were suddenly to meet Massey, I would hear him say that everything in this world is grey and mediocre and that Venice dazzles me because I came here ready to be dazzled."

We had to pass more than one domino and a second harlequin to be reminded that we were still in a carnival.  I told the gondolier that I found the abundance of people in disguise at this hour strange.

If I understood the man rightly (his dialect was rather broad), he replied that everyone was going to the Piazza San Marco where, at noon, there would be a costume competition.  This was something, he added, that I should definitely not miss as there the most beautiful Venetian women, famous around the world for their beauty, would be congregating.  Perhaps he took me to be ignorant, because he began naming all the masks he saw, pronouncing the names slowly and pedantically.

"Pul-ci-nel-la, Co-lum-bi-na, Do-mi-no."

Of course there were some people passing by whom I would not have identified otherwise: Il Dottore, with glasses and a big nose; Meneghino, with a white-striped tie; La Peste or La Malattia and one that I don't remember all too well, Brighella or something to that effect.

I disembarked on land near the Rialto bridge.  In the mail I sent off a card to my doctor ("Dear Dottore, a splendid trip. Am doing very well.  Regards").  And through the Mercerie I walked towards the Piazza San Marco, looking at the masks that happened to be around as if I were looking for one in particular.  It's not for nothing that they say that if we remember someone in time, we will meet that person.  On a bridge near a church – San Guiliano or Salvatore – I almost walked right into Massey.  I screamed at him in spontaneous ebullience:

"You!  Here!"

"We've been living in Venice for a while now.  When did you arrive?"

I didn't answer him immediately because this verb in the plural came off as rather unpleasant.  It only took a passing reference to Daniela to lower me into the depths of sadness; I thought that my old wounds had healed.  Finally I muttered:

"Last night."

"Why don't you come stay with us?  We have a few spare rooms."

"I would have liked to, but tomorrow I'm off to Paris," I lied so as not to subject myself to an encounter whose effect I could not gauge.

"If my wife knew that you were in Venice and that you left without seeing her, she would never forgive me.  Tonight Catalani's Lorelei is playing in La Fenice."

"I don't like opera."

"Who cares about the opera?  The important thing is spending some time together.  Come over to our opera box.  You'll have a lot of fun: there's a gala party for the carnival and everyone's going to be in costume."

"I don't like costumes."

"Very few men actually dress up.  It's the women who do." 

I had to believe that I'd done enough on my part and if Massey insisted, I couldn't keep saying no for much longer.  I think it was at that moment that I realized that the secret motivation for my trip had been the hope of meeting Daniela and that knowing she was in Venice and leaving without seeing her seemed to be an act of asceticism that was stronger than all my forces combined.

"We'll come get you at your hotel," he said.

"No, I'll come and meet you there.  Leave the ticket at will call."

He insisted that I be punctual, because if I arrived after the first chord had been played I wouldn't be allowed in until after the first act.  I had an impulse to ask about Daniela, but at the same time I was filled with apprehension and disgust owing to Massey's having mentioned her.  We said goodbye.

Máscaras venecianas (part 1)

The first part of a short story ("Venetian masks") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

When some people talk about somatization as if it were an inevitable reality, I tell myself bitterly that life is more complicated than they might suppose.  I neither attempt to persuade them otherwise nor forget my own experiences.  For many long years I stumbled from one love to another without a set course; there were few, considering how much time I spent, all sad and unresolved.  Then I met Daniela and knew that I had to search no longer, that everything had already been found.  And that was precisely when my fever attacks began.

I recall my initial visit to the doctor.

"Your glands are not unaffected by this fever," he announced.  "I'm going to prescribe you something that will reduce the swelling."

I took the statement to be good news; but as the doctor was writing down the prescription I asked myself whether the fact that he was giving me something for my symptoms might mean he wasn't giving me anything for my illness because it was incurable.  It occurred to me that if my doubts never left me I would have to ready myself for a stressful and anxious future; on the other hand, if I asked about my condition I would risk hearing an answer that rendered going on with my life impossible.  In any case, the idea of grave doubt seemed far too tiring for me and I got up the courage to ask.  He replied:

"Incurable?  Not necessarily.  There have been cases, I can assure you that there have been cases of total remission."

"Completely cured, you mean?"

"You said it.  I'll put all the cards on the table.  In situations like your present condition, a doctor will rely on all his energy to instill confidence in a patient.  Pay attention to what I'm about to tell you, because it's important.  There is no doubt that some cases have been cured.  Doubts only surface in the how and why of the cures."

"So there's no treatment?"

"There most certainly is treatment, palliative treatment."

"Which now and then results in a cure?"

He didn't tell me no and I poured all my desires of healing myself into this imperfect hope.

There seemed to be no doubt of my having fared poorly in the clinical examination; and yet when I left his office, I no longer knew what to think.  I still wasn't in any condition to attempt a balance, as if I had just gotten some news which, for a lack of time, I hadn't been able to read.  I was more crushed than sad.

Two or three days later the fever left me.  I was still a bit weak, a bit tired, and perhaps I accepted the physician's diagnosis literally.  Then I felt well, better even than before I fell sick, and began to tell myself that doctors were often not so sure about their diagnoses, that perhaps there would be no relapse.  My reasoning was as follows: "If it had to do so, some discomfort would surely manifest itself.  But the truth is I feel better than ever."

I did not deny my inherent proclivity towards a certain disbelief in illnesses.  Probably this was how I kept myself from the thoughts into which I tended to slip regarding, as it were, its possible effects on my future with Daniela.  I had grown accustomed to being happy and life without her was unimaginable.  I would tell her that a century was not enough for me to gaze upon her.  The exaggeration stated precisely what I felt.

I liked when she talked to me about her experiments.  On my own I imagined biology – her field of work – as an enormous river which flowing forth with prodigious revelations on each shore.  Thanks to a scholarship Daniela had studied in France with Jean Rostand and with his no less famous collaborator, Leclerc.  In describing the project which Leclerc had been working on for several years, Daniela used the word "carbonic"; Rostand, for his part, investigated the potential of speeding up the anabolism.  I remember that I said to her:

"I don't even know what the anabolism is."

"All beings pass through three periods," Daniela explained, "anabolism, growth, and then after a more or less extensive plateau, the period in which we are adults, there is the last phase, the catabolism or decadence.  Rostand believed that if we were to lose less time growing we could gain useful years for living."

"How old is he?"

"Almost eighty.  But don't believe that he's old.  All his students are in love with him."

Daniela smiled.  Without looking at her, I replied:

"If I were Rostand, I would devote my efforts to delaying, if not suppressing catabolism.  And I promise you I'm not saying that because I think he's old."

"Rostand thinks just like you, but insists that to understand the mechanism of decadence it is indispensable to understand the mechanism of growth."

A few weeks after my first outbreak of fever, Daniela got a letter from her teacher.  Her reading it to me gave me true satisfaction: I found it incomparably pleasant to see a man so famed for his intelligence value and love Daniela.

The card was a request for her help in an upcoming biology conference in Montevideo, where she would meet one of the group's researchers, a doctor Proux or Prioux, who would be able to update her on the current state of their work.

Daniela asked me:

"How do I tell him I don't want to go?"

She always found these congresses and international conferences useless.  I do not know anyone more reluctant to show off.

"Do you think saying no to Rostand would be a sign of ingratitude?"

"Everything I know, I owe to him."

"Then don't tell him no.  I'll go with you."

I remember the scene as if I could see it now: Daniela threw herself in my arms, muttered a pet name (which I won't bother mentioning since pet names of other people always seem ridiculous), and then exclaimed jubilantly:

"A week with you in Uruguay – how fun!"  She paused and added: "Especially if there were no conference."

She let me talk her into it.  The day of our departure I burned with fever, and by midmorning I felt absolutely awful.  If I didn't want to be burden to Daniela I would have to do without the trip.  I confess that I hoped for a miracle and that only at the very last minute did I announce that I wouldn't be going with her.   She accepted my decision, but then voiced her complaints:

"A whole week apart so that I don't miss out of this borefest!  Why didn't I tell Rostand no!"

Suddenly it was late.  Our very hurried farewell left me with feelings of incomprehension mixed with sadness, incomprehension mixed with neglect.  To console myself, I thought it was a stroke of luck that I hadn't had the time to explain the onset of my fever attacks.  I likely assumed that if I didn't talk about them, they would lose all importance.  This illusion did not last long.  I found myself so sick as to be completely disheartened and understood that it was serious and there was no cure.  The fever only yielded to treatment far more rigorous than what warded off my first attack, and I was left anxious and exhausted.  When Daniela returned I felt happy but I couldn't have looked particularly healthy because she asked me repeatedly how I was feeling.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't talk about my illness, but before god-knows-what-sentence in which I noticed, or thought I noticed, a veiled reproach for not having gone with her to Montevideo, I told her about my prognosis.  I told her only the essential bits, skimming over the treatments, which perhaps might not have taken place without a physician's help, so as to lend dimensions to the terrible truth which he had communicated to me.  Daniela asked:

"What are you suggesting?  That we stop seeing one another?"

I assured her:

"I don't have the strength within me to say it, but there is something that I can't forget: the day you met me I was a healthy man, and now I am anything but healthy."

"I don't understand," she replied.

I tried to explain to her that I did not have the right to burden her forever with my invalidism.  She saw it as a decision which was definitely nothing more than wild thoughts and scruples.  She muttered:

"Very well."

There was no argument because Daniela was very respectful of the will and decisions of others and, first and foremost, because she was upset.  From that day on I didn't see her.  I made light of the situation sadly: "This is the best solution for both of us.  However horrible her absence may be, closing my eyes to the facts would be worse.  It would be worse to tire her out, to notice her fatigue and her desire to leave."  In addition, my illness might oblige me to give up my daily work at the paper, which meant that Daniela would not only have to put up with me, she would also have to support me.

One of her comments came to mind which I used to find amusing.  Daniela said: "How fatiguing are these people who fight and make up."  For that reason I didn't dare make up with her.  I didn't go to see her or call her.  I simply looked for a casual meeting, and never in my life did I spend so much time walking through Buenos Aires.  When I left the paper I did not resign myself to heading home and putting off the chance of meeting her until tomorrow.  I slept badly and woke up as if I hadn't slept at all, but still sure that today would be the day I would run into her somewhere for the simple reason that I didn't have the strength to go on living without her.  Amidst these anxious expectations I learned that Daniela had left for France.

I told Hector Massey (a lifelong friend) what had happened to me.  He pondered the matter out loud:

"Look, people vanish.  You break up with someone and you never end up seeing her again.  It's always the same old story."

"Buenos Aires without Daniela is a different city."

"If that's how you see it, perhaps something I happened to read in a magazine will make you feel better: other cities are supposed to have twice as many people we know."

Perhaps he was saying this just to take my mind off the subject.  He had to have discerned my irritation because he apologized.

"I understand what it means to give up Daniela.  You'll never have a woman like her."

I don't like talking about my private life.  Nevertheless, I discovered that sooner or later I end up consulting with Massey on all the troubles in my personal sphere.  I'm probably just looking for his approval because I consider him honest and fair and because he never lets feelings sidetrack his criticism.  When I related to him the details of my last conversation with Daniela, he wanted to make sure that my illness was really the way I had described it and only afterwards tell me why.  He added:

"You're not going to find Daniela."

"I know that all too well," I  said.

Many times I've come to think that the ingenuous insensitivity of my friend is a virtue, since it lets him speak his mind with utter frankness.  People who consult him professionally – he's an attorney – praise him for what he thinks and for having a clear and simple vision of the facts.

I spent years marooned in my nightmare.  I hid my illness as a badge of shame and believed, perhaps with good reason, that if I couldn't see Daniela it wasn't worth seeing anyone.  I even avoided Massey; one day I learned that he was traveling in the United States or in Europe.  During work hours at the paper, I tried to isolate myself from my colleagues around me.  I retained in everything a certain thin hope which I never explicitly formulated but which helped me overcome my despair and adjust my actions with the invariable aim of reconstructing the ravaged sand castle that was my health: the desperate hope of curing myself – don't ask me when – and of finding Daniela again.  But hoping was not enough for me; I gave myself to imagination.  I dreamt of our reencounter.  Like a demanding film director, I reshot the scene again and again so that it would be even more moving and triumphant.  Many are of the opinion that the intellect is an obstacle to happiness.

But the real obstacle is imagination.

From Paris I got word that Daniela had immersed herself in her work and biology experiments.  I thought this good news, indeed.  I was never jealous of Rostand or Leclerc. 

Here is where I think I began to improve (the sick vacillate continuously between illusions and disillusions).  During the day I didn't think much about the next attack; the nights were also less frightening.  One morning, very early, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell.  When I opened the door, I saw Massey who, as far as I understood, had arrived from France – directly, without even so much as going by his own house.  I asked him whether he had seen her, and he said he had.  The silence that ensued was so long that I asked myself whether the fact that Massey was present here had anything to do with Daniela.  Then he said that he had come for the sole purpose of telling me that they had gotten married.  

The surprise and confusion left me speechless.  Finally I rejoined that I had an appointment with my doctor.  I was in such bad shape at this point that he could only believe me.

I never doubted that Massey had acted on good faith.  He had to have concluded that he wasn't taking anything away from me because it was I who had distanced myself from Daniela.  When he said that their marriage would not be an obstacle to our seeing one another, the three of us as we had before, I had to tell him that it would be best if we didn't see each other for a while.

I didn't tell him that his marriage wouldn't last.  And I didn't reach this conclusion out of spite, but based on my knowledge of the two people involved.  It is clear now that I was consumed by spite.  

A few months later I heard the news that they had split up.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off his translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on .... [and] Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading ... In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remained suspended ... just as the revolt remains suspended, while the conspirators wait in vain to begin it with their illustrious accomplice, and time weighs motionless on the flat shores of Arabia.

If you have never understood modern literary theory, you may consider what precisely there is to understand.  In the last sixty-odd years, in curious coincidence with the end of the most horrific war the world (here to mean Europe, which has always thought of itself as the center of the world) has ever seen, hope in the superfluous beauty of art and its promises was forsaken.  Shortly thereafter came the liberation of numerous nations from the yoke of colonialism and the repeated declaration that arts and the humanities – so casually scorned in the self-anointed center of world culture – have the same merit and dignity whatever the tradition.  Eurocentrism had finally been counteracted with postcolonialism and the relativism that it did not matter who wrote what, because anyone could have written anything (the corollary to this theorem states that innumerable works of art and literature perished or were never able to be created in many former colonial states owing to oppression and bigotry).  Now I in no way wish to belittle the championing of recently decolonized nations' artistic output; on the contrary, they should be encouraged and even lent added appreciation for the troubling times in which they came to be.  That said, destroying the fonts of culture and artistic glory for the semblance of equality is ridiculous and proven to be ridiculous by the mass of European intellectuals who continue both to live in and deride Europe.  Somehow it is easy to criticize one's government and the hypocrisy of one's neighbor towards the misery of others while sipping coffee and chewing on cake at an enchanting little bistro that just so happens to be located in one of the poshest parts of a very European capital. 

Yet frauds of this type have existed since time immemorial; there is another, more serious matter at hand: the destruction of authorship.  You may have heard of theorists who claim that the author is dead, that there is no real original thought, that we may put our names to our books, but these books are simply the amalgamations of countless other books that we have read over a lifetime filtered through our own experiences, precise readings, and, most scarily, our own interpretations of what those books might mean.  The end result is that we are no longer the authors of our own works; we are as much their translators, epigones, and forgers as the people chastised for piggybacking on the success of well-known writers or copying their style for a lack of their own.  The problem with working in such a context is that anything can be anything else; since nothing is absolute, the line on a curtain can be a highway in the desert; a barge upon the Seine can be the smile of an evil face half-shrouded in the gloam; and the floral patterns in your wallpaper can reveal the divine pattern of something unearthly.  And one writer's book can simply be the shadow of another until we are enveloped by a kingdom of darkness, which is much of the premise in this famous novel.

The novel divides into twelve numbered chapters and ten incipit chapters, all of which are sufficiently vague as to underscore the need to be vague, the first being the title of the novel itself.  The goal will be twofold: alternate between a reality involving a person (the Reader), a female love interest and a cast of secondary characters (including a rather bewildering scene at a fictitious university's language department) and the books that these characters happen to encounter, and repeatedly dampen the development of a full novel.  Our protagonist is a Reader who begins as the traveler one winter night and slowly becomes aware of his literary mission, which he abruptly tries to derail; of course, this being a very modern novel, Calvino does not allow him much leeway.  He traipses through, inter alia, the first chapters of a nouveau roman setting, a literary mystery, a novel set in Cimmeria, a work of socialist realism, a novel about a jogging professor terrified of hearing a phone ring, a novel about a billionaire who collects kaleidoscopes – all the while pursuing a woman (Ludmilla) who seems to be the ideal reader and avoiding her sister (Lotaria), who admits that, instead of reading a novel, she uses a computer program to feed her its most frequently used words in order to derive its meaning.  And yet whenever our Reader seems bound to make headway in deciphering his literary world, he is again subjected to a first chapter of a new novel that someone happens to be reading, translating, or forging.  The logic for such an endeavor is explained in Chapter Eight, the longest and best chapter by a certain Silas Flannery, a well-known Irish author who happens to be suffering from the inability to finish a novel:

I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object.  But how could such a book be constructed?  Would it break off after the first paragraph?  Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely?  Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?

The author (ostensibly Flannery) then sets about copying some of the opening lines of this Russian novel, a project he quickly abandons owing to his need to write and not just be a "copyist [living] simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing" – but the likening to the Thousand Nights and One Night has already met its mark.  As Scheherazade's aim is to keep herself alive and instruct the murderous king on morality and art so that he might stop slaying his wives, so is the format of Calvino's novel equally preposterous: a novel that will keep rebooting and recommencing to capture the magic of the incipit and never submit to the litany of additional detail necessary for a novel to sprawl out to its full length. 

Equally notable is the presence of a man called Ermes Marana.  Marana appears and disappears with the ease so commonly found in thrillers about untraceable operatives and unthinkable operations.  Yet by profession he is a translator, which reminds us of an old adage about translators.  He convinces Flannery that Japanese translators have so perfected their renditions of Flannery's novels that they now can write their own which, once translated back into English, cannot be distinguished from the authentic ones (the point being, as it were, that there is no such thing as an "authentic novel" but only an "authorial persona" to which a work is attributed).  Indeed, Marana's dream was "a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches," which is a concept first found in Borges well before any modern theorist turned it into a series of destructive (and ultimately pointless) cons.  That said, there are many superb moments: in one chapter, In a network of lines that enlace, a professor is humiliated by the guilt of having been forward, or having given the impression of wanting to be forward, with one of his students, resulting in a kidnapping, extortion and the phone call that he keeps hearing as a symbol of his guilt; Flannery's diary features a wonderful sequence with a writer staring with a spyglass every morning at a reader across the way, then at another writer, then at another reader who becomes the object of both writers and their desire to mimic the other's style (a novel-length investigation of this fascinating conceit would probably turn into the type of nouveau roman that so enthralled readers in the first twenty-odd postwar years – but that is neither here nor there).  Calvino's novel is painfully self-aware at times but oddly brilliant at others, refusing to endorse any particular framework apart from a suggestion that creation is an awe-inspiring feat that should not remain unrewarded.  So when Flannery, who is the closest thing to Calvino's alter ego in the novel, claims that "readers are my vampires.  I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper," we instinctively lean back – and then we catch ourselves.  Should we really be forced to read this way, or have we always done so and just not realized it?  Somehow I think we'll need more than an opening chapter to make up our minds.

Don't Look Now

Our tendency when informed that a film is a "horror movie" has developed astride that of modern culture.  It used to be that horror meant something otherworldly or eerie (or the German equivalent, unheimlich, which might be loosely etymologized as "not of the home"); this included the usual slew of specters, banshees, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and other disfigurations of life that served as foils to our own existence.  Now we are confronted with nothing more than disturbed humans, victims of an illness or a horrific childhood, who, as stated in a recent film in a somewhat different context,  "just want to see the city burn."  They are neither inherently evil nor have they ever really known the Good; they are instead fruit that was rotten upon birth or shortly thereafter and exculpated from any misdeeds they subsequently commit.  I have always found this later version of wickedness dull for one very good reason: its perpetrators are not free.  Let me correct that: we are not allowed to perceive them as free.  They are as much the victims as the hapless fools on whom they vent their inner demons.  Whatever the legal loophole or medical reason, they cannot be held responsible for their actions because we are apparently all logical animals who would never kill unless absolutely forced to do so to defend ourselves or our loved ones, although animals kill for many self-serving reasons all the time, not just for food or out of despair.  No, these killers are more repulsive than terrifying.  It is when you sense a second layer to life, and when that layer is not amenable to your well-being or some sign is being given that you might not understand, that you should be frightened out of your wits.  And few films are creepier than this horror classic.

In the very famous first scene, we meet an attractive young couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), and their two small children Johnny and Christine.  No harm is done to your enjoyment of the film by revealing that Christine drowns in one of the ponds at their large British estate garishly embalmed in a plastic red mackintosh.  At almost precisely the same moment, John is staring at a picture of a Venetian church he will spend the rest of the film restoring.  On the right-hand side (but the sinister left if one were actually at the altar) is a figure in a red cowl.  The figure's back is to John and to us, but the color of the hood is so red that we, just like John, start imagining a crimson gush across the whole picture.  John senses something is amiss and runs to find Christine lifeless and crimson (in her coat) in the aforementioned pond.  He screams one of those noiseless screams that detonate true anguish and is echoed by Laura's much louder shriek.

They are in a restaurant in Venice when we see them next.  Christine died in the fall and this is winter, but the actual timelag is never established.  The couple has gone through what can only be described as a living hell, although a stiff upper lip, John's endless work, and a lot of pills for Laura have alleviated some of the pain.  They exchange listless niceties about John's church and the food, always a good topic for a stay in Italy, until Laura espies two elderly women staggering towards the bathrooms; they are, like Laura, British, and one of them has something caught in her eye.  And here is where the coincidences, if that's what you want to call them, begin to accumulate.  It turns out that the two women, Wendy and Heather, are sisters.  Wendy can't dislodge whatever got stuck in her eye because Heather, who has some of the deadest, shark-like blue eyes you will ever find, is herself unable to see the physical world.  Heather compensates by seeing what we would wish to look into: the psychic world.  Her visions are both auditory and visual, but she also senses the beyond in many curious ways (including a later séance which seems to have sexual implications).  Of course, we know at once that she will see Christine among her thoughts, a healthy, radiant Christine "sitting between her parents and laughing."  Anxious to latch on to anything, Laura believes Heather because of the detailed description of the red mackintosh, which brings us to the subject of red.

The director of Don't Look Now was once the cinematographer on an adaptation of this classic Poe tale in which red represents, literally and figuratively, the end of everything (there is even a billboard exclaiming "Venice in Peril," although no further detail is provided).  And why the color red?  There is no symbolic meaning other than its unnaturalness, its audacity, its boldness.  When Laura finally feels better, she puts on red leather boots and takes along a red purse.  But John experiences something drastically different: he begins to see a small, cowled red figure darting between the innumerable Venetian alleys.  He is told that there is a killer on the loose, but that red coat reminds him so much of Christine (he even sees her reflection in the water as the figure scampers by) that he cannot decide whether what he sees is a symbol of Good or a harbinger of his own doom.  You will hold your breath whenever red enters your purview – it is rather amazing – and you will feel the mounting turpitude in the empty streets, the scowls, the subdued disdain that John and Laura find on every face.  There are many faces in the crowd, one of whom is the bishop (Massimo Serato) of the Church that John is restoring, and you do not have to see the film twice to notice something incredibly wrong with this man.  I suppose there's a reason the bishop asks Laura whether she is a Christian, and she says she's nice to children and animals because that is what we think of Christians today.  The bishop winces at the thought of foul play, although one gets the impression that he owes his annoyance to not having thought of the misdeed himself.  "I hope that's not another murder," he says casually as a body is fished out of the canals, while every part of his face and body hints at a mild satisfaction with the outcome.

Yet what is most wonderful about this film is the proximity of its angles: simply anything could jump out from any corner at any time.  The buildup, as is the case in any great story of suspense, is painfully slow to the point that you will want what is about to happen more than the characters who are living it (most evident perhaps in the fantastic scaffolding scene, in which we feel as disoriented as the people involved).  The camera lingers on doors, corners, windows, empty spaces, and we fill them with our fears.  The strange scene in which the bishop is talking at, but not to, a beautiful and ashamed woman sitting across his pious desk; the blind woman going up the steps without any help; the twitch in the deputy's face as John leads the blind woman out of the detention center; the quick interlude where the psychic and her sister are seen cackling in their room as Laura tells John that these "two neurotic old ladies" are helping her get over the tragedy; the bust in the room of the psychic and her sister, a small boy in ebony called Angus, who also died very young; a devilish bust underneath a hood atop what appears to be one of the church's gargoyles, which might foreshadow another scene; the passing, as John discusses the matter with an Italian official, of a couple of old women underneath the official's window as he starts making blasphemously evil doodles on the police drawings of these women; the fact that John is reading this German play about the ills of the Catholic church in the original language.  All of these details converge around a statement about John made by one of the characters that he never gets a chance to hear.  What he does hear is that the canals sound different to Heather – they sound "like a city in aspic full of dead people after a dinner party," at which point she mentions the greatest of all poets and his love for Venice.  All the scenes are linked by virtue of their being gathered together, just like the nightmare whose form they assume.  A shame perhaps that such a clever and unusual movie would have such a tepid, almost banal title (you can blame the original work); yet evil, real evil, is always banal.  And at the end of this nightmare there is little more than evil.