The Moravian Night Page 13

  During the drive to New Numancia he asked the passenger beside him a question, one the man had heard more and more often in the course of his life: “Are you still writing?” Under different circumstances the answer had always been “No,” and initially it had spared him from having to say more—for those asking the question all took it for granted that he had stopped writing—and later the answer became the truth. This time, however, he lied: “Yes, I’m still writing.” And as soon as the words left his mouth, the thought came: Now I’ve said it, I have to stick to it. The lie had simply slipped out—and was it really a lie, spoken without any ulterior motive, without any calculation? The response from the poet at the wheel—not a single other vehicle on the road—“I’ve never written a single line of prose. All that exists for me is poetry. Descriptions, dialogue, stories mean nothing to me, not to mention plots, action, dramatic events, conflict, problems—yes indeed. Language alone means something to me. That’s where I achieve my only victories. But you’re a storyteller, a man of prose. And as a poet I predict that you’ll write a love story, a dramatic one, a story such as only you can let others experience. I also know you’re already writing it. And it doesn’t have to culminate the usual way, with a revolver being aimed at the man fleeing from love as he stands on the cliffs above the Pacific. Bim, bam, boom can happen in other ways.”

  Juan Lagunas dropped the storyteller off somewhere in town. (Question interjected by the “spoilsport” on the Moravian boat: “In front of a hotel? In front of the railroad station? And where was the small suitcase all this time?” No answer.) A last exchange of looks, also with the dog, which had sprawled on the vacated front seat, its usual place. Juan’s eyes: still full of expectancy—then bitterly disappointed—and in the end once more expressionless. This person, too, upon their reunion after a quarter century, had failed to provide the poet with the existential foundation he so urgently needed. Existential foundation? Yes, and also confirmation of his existence. Yes, he, Juan Lagunas from the vanished town of Numancia, could receive both an existential foundation and a confirmation of existence only from someone else; another person had to ground his, Juan’s, existence and also confirm it. And once more he had been disappointed by such a person.

  And when he nonetheless finally spoke audibly again, the words took shape as if without benefit of his voice, simply from a flapping of his lips, like that of small children who cannot speak yet but play at speaking—except that this was no game. With some effort one could decipher what he was saying, and in the end had to read it from his lips, now moving without sound: “Home to my children, entrusted to me, my ghosts. All I want to do now is sleep, naked, without dreams and nightmares to wake me. Once I invented a secret script and went around this town from one person to the next, thinking someone could decipher it. But no one could decipher it. No one wanted to decipher it. We two have met twice over the years, amigo lector. And there will be no third time, and if there is, it will be in a figurative sense, in a fundamentally different sphere, whose music will perhaps be white noise.”

  4

  AS THE STORYTELLER announced, getting ahead of himself during that night on the Morava, the prophecy about the “love story” made by the poet of Numancia would eventually turn out to be true, in the form of “a literally unheard-of occurrence.” But for a long, long while the former writer remained alone as his journey continued. And that was how it was supposed to be. And it was to be the case—so he thought and resolved—that during this period he was moving farther and farther from the main destination chosen in advance, deep inside Austria. The more horizons he placed between himself and his land of origin, the more clearly he could perceive one vanished detail or another, from among which not a few individual destinations offered themselves within the orbit of the main destination. And from time to time he also experienced, in defiance of the laws of physics, that as the physical distance increased, the pull of the destinations grew stronger.

  During this period he hardly lingered anywhere. And he gave himself time for detours and distractions. To be sure, he was heading steadily westward, toward the Atlantic. But he meandered, following the example of the rivers that streamed toward the ocean in leisurely snakelike movements. And again it was perfectly fine with him that he was putting himself and his project at risk, without specifically seeking out dangers of one kind or another. On airplane wings, toward the tips, where they appeared less massive, there was usually a line marked for the mechanics servicing the aircraft, together with the admonition: “Do not walk outside this area.” At least once a day if possible, he stepped over the line, for a longer or shorter time. A kind of rejuvenating strength flowed into one from such prohibited movements. And after certain moments of terror, experienced unintentionally, one saw more keenly, or grasped what was actually going on. And because this time, in contrast to earlier journeys, he did not note down anything, not a single word, and had finally shaken off being a writer, even though his writing had never been a compulsion (?), he enjoyed a sense of freedom, far more intensely during the journey than when he had stayed put, even on the boat on the Morava—a sense of freedom that constituted for him, as it did for the rest of us, something exceedingly rare, a kind of happiness.

  He remained alone week after week, paying special attention to those who were also alone, although in a different way from him. In Salamanca, let’s say, down on the bank of the Tormes, he lost himself in contemplation of a young man standing there completely equipped for mountain-climbing in the high Alps: hanging from his belt he had several looped-up climbing ropes, as well as a number of pitons and rings in different sizes, also rock hammers, ice picks, flashlights, and headlamps … During that night of storytelling on the Morava, he left to our imagination the other items the young man had dangling from his belt, with the exception of a key ring, bristling with perhaps a hundred keys. The man stood there motionless, gazing at the river for hours, his face blank. But there was nothing contemplative about him. He was alert, ready to spring into action, his eyes narrowed in such a way that it would have been obvious to anyone: if anything serious were to happen within his field of vision, on the water or up on the Roman bridge, he would be off like a shot, armed with his hammers, turnbuckles, and ropes, to provide first aid, or intervene, or execute a capture, or perform some other official action—indubitably as the agent in charge. And it was clear that he was not in charge of the actual people in his field of vision, those passing before him on the bridge and on the riverfront promenade. With narrowed eyes and chin thrust forward he gazed past and through them all and over their heads, his supporting leg and his working leg poised for motion. His assignment pertained to something that would take place farther away, much farther away, in an undetermined location. And even once he finally moved, heading uphill into the city, his equipment rattling and thumping around him with each of his heavy, no, powerful steps, to take up his next post at an intersection, this standing on guard, more a form of remaining alert, again for hours and motionlessly, had nothing to do with the passing cars or the crowds of pedestrians, which swelled toward evening and seemed to take as little notice of him as he took of them. But one time, when a girl brought him a cup of coffee from a shop on the corner and asked the man on guard at the intersection how he was faring, he beamed, silently, “for a fraction of a second” all over his face, whereupon he once more narrowed his eyes, all the more ready to leap into action and intervene, one hand on the ropes at his belt, the other on the key ring, bristling like a weapon.

  Another time, in a bar in Ciudad Rodrigo, already close to the Portuguese border, our storyteller could not take his eyes off an old man, more enthroned than seated at a table in the rear, far from the other guests, although he was a guest himself. In spite of the sun’s warmth, he had on a fur cap. The table heaped with documents, manuscripts, to which the man kept adding piles of papers that he pulled out of a briefcase leaning against a leg of his table. Black flies, large ones, buzzed around the old man, who paid them no
mind as he shuffled through his papers, making notes, adding dots, always from right to left, as if he were writing in Arabic. Whenever he added dots, sometimes just one, sometimes two, sometimes three, it could be heard all through the bar, in spite of the babble of voices and the seductive melodies from the jukeboxes, and he seemed to be more in his element than when he was forming letters, all of them teensy-weensy.

  When he stopped now and then, he would inspect a word or a letter through a magnifying glass. And that always took the longest time. The magnifying glass, not the gold or gold-plated fountain pen, was his primary instrument. After an expansive gesture, in which he ceremoniously shook his jacket sleeves back from his wrists, he would move the magnifying glass in circles above the page until finally it swooped down over the curlicue in question, or whatever. But then the old man devoted more and more of his time to making lines. It began with his obviously underlining things, this, too, from right to left, and later it became a crossing-out, first of a single word, then of an entire line or a whole page, with diagonal lines back and forth, and then another page, and another, the process accompanied by a snorting that swelled from displeasure to rage, then a fist pounding the table. Then came a sudden change of image: renewed silence, the pen moving quietly, and page after page receiving something applied briefly and with a flourish, like a signature. That was followed by his looking up and gazing around the room with an imperious air. Silent memorizing of the text. Preparations for his coronation speech: laying his index finger at the root of his nose, then his ring finger; supporting his chin on first one, then the other hand; both palms held up, weighing pros and cons; arms spread wide. But as soon as he caught sight of his sole observer: an instantaneous halt to all this, a blow with his fist on the table, then gathering up and packing the manuscripts into his briefcase, and hurrying out of the room. In a different era he would have had the evildoer killed. “Never again shall you look upon your king!”

  Our storyteller did not avoid cities, but in them he stayed closer to the roads leading out of them than to the centers. Something new of late was the presence of more and more benches, extending all the way to the roundabouts at the city limits, and around them. He often sat there, reading, looking up, turning back to his reading. One day, during one of his far-flung meanders, he became fixated on a group of the sort of people one could count on finding in such places: idiots. No other term came to him, and he was fond of the word, one of those that stayed with one from childhood, like “gypsies,” “cottagers,” “path-makers,” “mountaineers,” “blacksmiths.” The idiots were taking their daily walk, accompanied by caretakers, distinguishable from their charges, if at all, by a certain seriousness of demeanor, not consistently maintained. They did not lead the group but let some go on ahead, themselves staying more in the middle. Like him, the idiots seemed to be drawn to the outskirts and to the highways. Unlike him, they lingered for hardly a minute on the benches by the star-shaped intersections at the city limits: jumping up, they circled the roundabout, hopping and hobbling in procession as they went on their way.

  On the day in question, instead of being content with gazing at and gazing after the group, he closed his book and followed them on their rounds. He stopped when they stopped, stared at the things they stared at. He made no effort to go unnoticed. He actually wanted them to know that he had his eye on them, wanted them to feel affirmed by his following. This following, like his gaze, was meant to indicate to them that they had something to offer. The very fact that he had a book in his hand, with one finger keeping his place, indicated more than just goodwill. They were the stars, and in him they had found their fan, only one, true, but he mattered.

  They stopped in front of a billboard, located in the roundabout, with posters for all the films currently playing in the city. Silently they mimed in meticulous detail stories that the facial expressions and postures on the posters suggested to them. Was it more than his imagination that his engagement with them had animated them this way? Perhaps they had not even noticed him. And the two caretakers ignored him as one of the gawkers they often encountered on their excursions with the little troupe. Nonetheless, with them before his eyes, he was convinced he was acting on their behalf, in their name. He had to do so, in the interest of something higher. He had nothing better to do than to keep on the trail of these idiots, with all his senses, and not for this moment only. Rather than carrying out surveillance of pilgrims on their way to Santiago, or of anyone else, his mission was to attend to these poor in spirit.

  How did it happen that, at least on the open road, human beings appeared to him almost exclusively in the form of the disturbed or the confused? Was there something inside him, in his mind or such, that merely made it seem that way? No, in this case at least, his mind, or his consciousness, or his feelings, or such, happened to be the world. He knew that, at least until the moment when one member of the group, the straggler, the only one who had not participated in the others’ performances, or at most constantly whimpering, with arms dangling, was taken in hand by a caretaker as he stood there motionless, whereupon the straggler suddenly turned around, recognized the pursuer—yes, that was what he was—ran toward him and struck him, feebly, to be sure, but with a feebleness that resulted in the blows’ seeming to miss the other person’s chest and stomach on purpose, breaking off just a hairsbreadth before their goal, and if a blow did happen to land, it seemed more like a form of clinging, though a clumsy one, which had its own kind of strength.

  And that became clear to him from the way people appeared to him after the idiot ran toward him and after this straggler there by the highway leading out of the city shouted in his face: “Make God leave me in peace! Make him stop hurting me day and night. Make him stop hanging around me all the time and wanting something of me. Make him stop thinking of me, make someone else think of me, someone other than this Lord God! God, my God, when will you abandon me? Get out of me, will you?” A strange longing seized hold of the man at whom the straggler was shouting, a longing for the idiots in his Balkan enclave and the way they hung around all the intersections, their faces turned away.

  But during that night on the Morava the storyteller had no idea, none at all, what he meant to convey to us with this episode other than the event itself. He faltered, then broke off in the middle. Again he had not found the right words, the scintillating detail, the suggestive image, the illuminating comparison. Yet he had felt compelled to speak of his encounter with the idiots by the roundabout on the edge of the city, of their eyes in comparison to those of the drivers, of their voices in comparison to those that people sometimes used to call their dogs, of their movements—the way they swung their arms, raised their legs, wagged their heads—in comparison to … Did he miss the sense of danger he needed for that kind of pointed storytelling? Did our host need a new source of danger? The night all around the boat remained peaceful. The Morava frogs croaked. The trees in the meadows along the river rustled. The distant expressway roared. The satellites blinked. The stars gazed down.

  For a long time the boatmaster kept silent, brooding, until he recognized that the danger that would motivate him was the same danger that had just threatened his story. It was an internal danger, and by remaining conscious of it as a constant threat, his constant threat, he would perhaps receive an even stronger impetus, an equally hearty incentive to keep going. And what was this internal danger? It was, as he spelled out for the rest of us, the danger of falling into a reverie, something that happened to him from time to time. And what was dangerous about that? It was dangerous in two respects: first because by now he could almost, but fortunately only almost, summon these reveries at will. The far greater danger, the real one, was that in such fugue states the world showed itself to him on the one hand as it never did otherwise, even approximately—as whole, as a whole—but on the other hand nothing more could be said to it, about it. This whole world, even when it droned, roared, and howled, as it did out there by the roundabouts, remained silent and could
be greeted only with a great silence. “It” revealed itself then, silently, and that was that. It not only called for no words; words were no longer appropriate, not a single one, not even an exclamation, an Oh!, an Ah!, a Hey there! “By far the greatest danger, however, in my reveries,” our nocturnal host continued, “is this: in the form of a detail, a street, a house, a wall plastered with posters, a person, the totality of the world appears to me, behind or beyond it, the totality of the world in the sense of something that has remained whole. Against my—what’s the phrase?—better judgment, an intact world appears to me, and this intact world forces itself upon me as the superior reality, the reality that counts. Cars drive by, chimneys puff smoke, bushes sway, the grass quivers, saws whine, children cry, the blind feel their way along: that is as it should be. Everything is in order. It would take so little for the world to appear to me in my reverie as the best of all possible worlds. It would take so little for a war to fit into this state of affairs. Yes, what results is a static condition, a standstill, a dead stop, seemingly definitive, once and for all. And time and again this standstill, monumentlike, monumental, seizing hold of me, has relieved my innermost being for the moment—each time it lasted only that long—of the burden of my self, but at the same time, as I realized almost too late, threatened me to the core, and especially during my life as a writer, a life that indeed, purely instinctively, depended on a constant rhythmic motion, even if it was teeny-tiny, in fact, the more teeny-tiny the more right, the smaller the better—depended on the succession of moments, not on moments of standstill, no matter how monumental. And although I no longer write anything down, I do not quite know what to do with my reveries, to which part of me clings, in spite of everything, because they help me get out of myself and into the world, into you over here, into you over there. All’s well when I do nothing but live them, and keep them to myself—not well when I wish to impart them to all of you, a wish, which, whether recorded in writing or not, still remains a fervent one, at least as far as you are concerned. Reverie? Foolish obsession? A dreamer, a fool? An idiot yourself?” And then the boatmaster added, “What seems most worrisome about my reveries is that they mean I have nothing to read anymore; that they replace reading or even make it superfluous; that the admonition ‘Here, take this and read it!’ no longer carries any weight.”