If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Page 3

  “Then I am here, I am the I of the present, with this suitcase.”

  This is the first time I mention the suitcase, even though I never stop thinking about it.

  And she says, “This is the evening of square suitcases on wheels.”

  I remain calm, impassive. I ask, “What do you mean?”

  “I sold one today, a suitcase like that.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “A stranger. Like you. He was on his way to the station, he was leaving. With an empty suitcase, just bought. Exactly like yours.”

  “What’s odd about that? Don’t you sell suitcases?”

  “I have a lot of this model in stock at the shop, but nobody here buys them. People don’t like them, or they’re no use. Or people don’t know them. But they must be convenient.”

  “Not for me. For example, just when I’m thinking that this evening could be a beautiful evening for me, I remember I have to drag this suitcase after me, and I can’t think about anything else.”

  “Then why don’t you leave it somewhere?”

  “Like a suitcase shop,” I say.

  “Why not? Another suitcase, more or less.”

  She stands up from the stool, adjusts the collar of her overcoat in the mirror, the belt.

  “If I come by later on and rap on the shutter, will you hear me?”

  “Try.”

  She doesn’t say good-bye to anyone. She is already outside in the square.

  Dr. Marne leaves the pinball machine and approaches the bar. He wants to look me in the face, perhaps overhear some remarks from the others, or only a snicker. But they are talking of bets, the bets on him, not caring if he listens. There is a stirring of gaiety and intimacy, of slaps on the back, which surrounds Dr. Marne, a business of old jokes and teasing; but at the center of this merriment there is a zone of respect that is never breached, not only because Marne is a physician, public health officer or something of the sort, but also because he is a friend, or perhaps because he’s a poor bastard who bears his misfortunes while remaining a friend.

  “Chief Gorin is arriving later than all the predictions tonight,” someone says, because at that moment the chief enters the bar.

  He enters. “Good evening, one and all!" He comes over to me, lowers his eyes to the suitcase, the newspaper, mutters through clenched teeth, “Zeno of Elea,” then goes to the cigarette machine.

  Have they thrown me to the police? Is he a policeman who is working for our organization? I go over to the machine as if I were also buying cigarettes.

  He says, “They’ve killed Jan. Clear out.”

  “The suitcase?” I ask.

  “Take it away again. We want nothing to do with it now. Catch the eleven o’clock express.”

  “But it doesn’t stop here....”

  “It will. Go to track six. Opposite the freight station. You have three minutes.”

  “But...”

  “Move, or I’ll have to arrest you.”

  The organization is powerful. It can command the police, the railroad. I trail my suitcase along the passages between the tracks until I reach track six. I walk along the platform. The freight section is at the end, with the grade crossing that opens into the fog and the darkness. The chief is at the door of the station bar, keeping an eye on me. The express arrives at top speed. It slows down, stops, erases me from the chief’s sight, pulls out again.

  [2]

  You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: “This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you. But, at the same time, you also feel a certain dismay; just when you were beginning to grow truly interested, at this very point the author feels called upon to display one of those virtuoso tricks so customary in modem writing, repeating a paragraph word for word. Did you say paragraph? Why, it’s a whole page; you make the comparison, he hasn’t changed even a comma. And as you continue, what develops? Nothing: the narration is repeated, identical to the pages you have read!

  Wait a minute! Look at the page number. Damn! From page 32 you’ve gone back to page 17! What you thought was a stylistic subtlety on the author’s part is simply a printers’ mistake: they have inserted the same pages twice. The mistake occurred as they were binding the volume: a book is made up of sixteen-page signatures; each signature is a large sheet on which sixteen pages are printed, and which is then folded over eight times; when all the signatures are bound together, it can happen that two identical signatures end up in the same copy; it’s the sort of accident that occurs every now and then. You leaf anxiously through the next pages to find page 33, assuming it exists; a repeated signature would be a minor inconvenience, the irreparable damage comes when the proper signature has vanished, landing in another copy where perhaps that one will be doubled and this one will be missing. In any event, you want to pick up the thread of your reading, nothing else matters to you, you had reached a point where you can’t skip even one page.

  Here is page 31 again, page 32 ... and then what comes next? Page 17 all over again, a third time! What kind of book did they sell you, anyway? They bound together all these copies of the same signature, not another page in the whole book is any good.

  You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where spacetime has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. Merely what it deserves, neither more nor less.

  But no. Instead you pick it up, you dust it off; you have to take it back to the bookseller so he will exchange it for you. You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions—carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others’. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events. You can’t wait to get your hands on a nondefective copy of the book you’ve begun. You would rush to the bookshop at once if shops were not closed at this hour. You have to wait until tomorrow.

  You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which
direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.

  The next day, as soon as you have a free moment, you run to the bookshop, you enter, holding the book already opened, pointing your finger at a page, as if that alone were enough to make clear the general disarray. “You know what you sold me?...Look here.... Just when it was getting interesting...”

  The bookseller maintains his composure. “Ah, you, too? I’ve had several complaints already. And only this morning I received a form letter from the publisher. You see? ‘In the distribution of the latest works on our list a part of the edition of the volume If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino has proved defective and must be withdrawn from circulation. Through an error of the bindery, the printed signatures of that book became mixed with those of another new publication, the Polish novel Outside the town of Malbork by Tazio Bazakbal. With profound apologies for the unfortunate incident, the publisher will replace the spoiled copies at the earliest possible moment, et cetera.’ Now I ask you, must a poor bookseller take the blame for the negligence of others? We’ve been going crazy all day. We’ve checked the Calvinos copy by copy. There are a number of sound volumes, happily, and we can immediately replace your defective Traveler with a brand-new one in mint condition.”

  Hold on a minute. Concentrate. Take all the information that has poured down on you at once and put it in order. A Polish novel. Then the book you began reading with such involvement wasn’t the book you thought but was a Polish novel instead. That is the book you are now so anxious to procure. Don’t let them fool you. Explain clearly the situation. “No, actually I don’t really give a damn about that Calvino any more. I started the Polish one and it’s the Polish one I want to go on with. Do you have this Bazakbal book?”

  “If that’s what you prefer. Just a moment ago, another customer, a young lady, came in with the same problem, and she also wanted to exchange her book for the Polish. There, you see that pile of Bazakbal on the counter, right under your nose? Help yourself.”

  “But will this copy be defective?”

  “Listen. At this point I’m not swearing to anything. If the most respected publishing firms make such a muddle, you can’t trust anything any more. I’ll tell you exactly what I told the young lady. If there is any further cause for complaint, you will be reimbursed. I can’t do more than that.”

  The young lady. He has pointed out a young lady to you. She is there between two rows of bookshelves in the shop, looking among the Penguin Modern Classics, running a lovely and determined finger over the pale aubergine-colored spines. Huge, swift eyes, complexion of good tone and good pigment, a richly waved haze of hair.

  And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don’t waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?

  “Then you, too, ha ha, the Pole,” you say, all in one breath. “But that book that begins and then gets stuck there, what a fraud, because it happened to you, too, I’m told; and the same with me, you know? Having given it a try, I’m dropping this one and taking this other, but what a coincidence, the two of us.”

  Hmm, perhaps you could have coordinated it a bit better, but you have at least expressed the main ideas. Now it’s her turn.

  She smiles. She has dimples. She is even more attractive to you.

  She says: “Ah, indeed, I was so anxious to read a good book. Right at the beginning, this one, no, but then it began to appeal to me.... Such a rage when I saw it broke off. And it wasn’t that author. It did seem right away a bit different from his other books. And it was really Bazakbal. He’s good, though, this Bazakbal. I’ve never read anything of his.”

  “Me either,” you can say, reassured, reassuring.

  “A bit too unfocused, his way of telling a story, too much so for me. I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.”

  You shake your head pensively. “In fact, there is that risk.”

  “I prefer novels,” she adds, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most commonplace things that in real life seem indifferent to me.”

  Do you agree? Then say so. “Ah, yes, that sort of book is really worthwhile.”

  And she continues: “Anyway, this is also an interesting novel, I can’t deny that.”

  Go on, don’t let the conversation die. Say something; just keep talking. “Do you read many novels? You do? So do I, or some at least, though nonfiction is more in my line....” Is that all you can think of? Now what? Are you stopping? Good night! Aren’t you capable of asking her: Have you read this one? And this? Which of the two do you like better? There, now you have something to talk about for half an hour.

  The trouble is that she’s read many more novels than you have, especially foreign ones, and she has an orderly memory, she refers to specific episodes; she asks you, “And do you remember what Henry’s aunt says when...” and you, who unearthed that title because you know the title and nothing more, and you liked letting her believe you had read it, now have to extricate yourself with generic comments, like “It moves a bit slowly for me,” or else “I like it because it’s ironic,” and she answers, “Really? You find it ironic? I wouldn’t have said...” and you are upset. You launch into an opinion on a famous author, because you have read one of his books, two at most, and without hesitation she attacks frontally the opera omnia, which she seems to know perfectly, and if she does have some doubts, that’s worse still, because she asks you, “And the famous episode of the cut photograph: is it in that book or the other one? I always get them mixed up....” You make a guess, since she gets mixed up. And she says; “Why, what are you talking about? That can’t be right...” Well, let’s say you both get mixed up.

  Better to fall back on your reading of yesterday evening, on the volume you are both now clutching in your hands, which should repay you for your recent disappointment. “Let’s hope,” you say, “that we’ve got a perfect copy this time, properly bound, so we won’t be interrupted right at the climax, as happens...” (As happens when, how? What do you mean?) “I mean, let’s hope we get to the end satisfactorily.”

  “Oh, yes,” she answers. Did you hear that? She said, “Oh, yes.” It’s your turn now, it’s up to you to make a move.

  “Then I hope I’ll meet you again, since you’re also a customer here; that way we could exchange our impressions after reading the book.” And she answers, “With pleasure.”

  You know where you want to arrive, it is a fine net you are spreading out. “The funniest thing would be if, just as we had thought we were reading Italo Calvino and it turned out to be Bazakbal, now that we hope to read Bazakbal we open the book and find Italo Calvino.”

  “Oh, no! If that happens, we’ll sue the publisher!”

  “Listen, why don’t we exchange telephone numbers?” (This is what you were aiming at, O Reader, moving around her like a rattlesnake!) “That way, if one of us finds something wrong with his copy, he can ask the other for help.... If there are two of us, we have a better chance of putting together a complete copy.”

  There, you have said it. What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?

  You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period when yo
u could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book—of a reading experience you are impatient to resume—and the expectation contained in that telephone number—of hearing again the vibrations, at times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a short while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

  Who you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to ask. It’s your business, you’re on your own. What counts is the state of your spirit now, in the privacy of your home, as you try to re-establish perfect calm in order to sink again into the book; you stretch out your legs, you draw them back, you stretch them again. But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers.

  This volume’s pages are uncut: a first obstacle opposing your impatience. Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the title page and the beginning of the first chapter. And then...