The programme involved an incredible novelty, the result of recent advances in design and animation technology. The happy combination of a team of doctors, artists and computer whizz-kids had succeeded in creating a model of the female sexual organs. For the first time in history, this had allowed the exact location of the clitoris to be identified. It was not that the existence of this tiny pleasure spot or its position had been unknown, but the man in the street, the average husband or lover, still had difficulties finding it. This was due to the confusion produced by verbal descriptions of it, a confusion never resolved by the drawings in books illustrating these descriptions. On the contrary: it was the drawings that had ended up making the difficulty impenetrable. The two-dimensional representations had all the well-known limitations, but these became insurmountable when it came to the complex ‘empty volumes’ of the external area of the female reproductive organ. It did not help that humans had evolved from standing on four legs to becoming bipeds, which meant these volumes were in a position that conventional drawings could not properly depict.
The solid, three-dimensional models that pedagogical ingenuity had come up with, besides being hidden in university lecture theatres or anatomical museums, had been too small and hard to manipulate to fulfil their function… Until now, nobody had imagined that the ideal medium for bringing the Good News to the public was television. The 3-D animation, digitalised and driven by a specially developed programme, instantly resolved all the problems of comprehension. TV viewers could take a virtual stroll through this first interior, or ‘exterior interior’, with all its nooks and crannies, its superimposed concavities and convexities. By identifying with the eye of the camera, they could finally orient themselves and discover once and for all where this elusive little phantom was to be found. And the Korean people were to have the privilege of being the first to know.
Conscious of the importance of sexual pleasure in life, the little Buddhist monk had waited impatiently for the transmission. The contemporary passion for television had finally found an object worthy of the eagerness with which a programme was anticipated. Recalling his own expectation was like being wounded by an arrow of time in the depths of the dark night, and made him even more anxious. There was no way he could miss it! To him it was a life-or-death affair, and he refused to consider whether he was behaving like a child. Wasn’t this on the contrary the most adult thing that had ever happened in his life? And there was no question of waiting for the repeat, because there wouldn’t be one. The producer had been through a lot just to get permission for this screening. The legal battle had lasted for months, and even now had not been finally resolved: the transmission was going ahead thanks to an injunction that could still be appealed against, as a defiant gesture of ‘now or never’. The next day, the Korean newspapers would be full of indignant readers’ letters from the usual reactionaries, and the scandal would put so much pressure on the judges that it would be banned forever. Besides, nobody would call for it to be repeated. Why would they, if they had already discovered what they were after? A predictable psychological reaction could come into play: those who already knew the secret (the path to the hidden object) would not want the others to discover it. It did not matter that tens of millions of viewers would have seen the programme; the unique quality of the occasion made the revelation invaluable. They would rub their hands gleefully, telling themselves ‘anyone who missed it has missed it forever’. They would be able to gloat at their superiority over these real or virtual losers. And the losers could well be real, as perfectly real as he himself would be if he did not arrive in time.
Had he reached the centre of the forest? He had no way of knowing. All of a sudden he couldn’t recognise his surroundings, even if all along he couldn’t see a thing. The screen of trees was so thick it seemed almost solid; he groped his way along, rushing up and down on the uneven ground, squeezing his way between two trunks or falling headlong into a bush and kicking out desperately until he freed himself from the suffocating clutch of flowers that were as cold and silky as fish.
Looking up, he could see the topmost foliage as black on black, being whipped around by a wind that did not reach the ground. Turning his head, he could make out the yellowish wake he himself had left behind. He was no longer looking where he put his feet, while at the same time he was paying ever more attention to it. He saw that the ground was rising and remembered, with a sigh of dismay, that there were mountains in the middle of the forest, and that he would have to cross them as well. Mountains that were part of the forest, hidden beneath the trees but still high enough to have ravines, rivers, snowy peaks and dangerous bridges suspended over abysses.
He did not slow down. He would not have done so even if he had remembered there was also an ocean in his way. On the contrary, he tried to go faster, but had reached such an extreme of exhaustion that his legs no longer obeyed him. They were like rubber. The tears of despair coursing down his cheeks were no fuel for his flagging machine. But even in the depths of his paralysis he was still confident of arriving. Of course, the depths were not the surface, and here he was aware of the unassailable distance between the size of the forest and his own small stature. However often he multiplied his tiny footsteps, they were pathetic millimetres. If only he were not so weary…
In one final spasm of hope, he told himself that the subjective component of time might be deceiving him. There were occasions when mental tension, or simple impatience, made what was in fact a minute seem like an hour. Unfortunately this was not the case now. What he was seeing was the evolution of species, and that took more than a minute.
This was not a metaphor: he was really seeing. The faint glow he left in his wake had spread all around him, and the darkness yielded to the dim outlines of a gothic, overloaded nature, which from his point of view looked monumental. The trees were monsters draped in moss and creepers, the flowers opened and closed, nocturnal wasps the size of doves climbed the spiralling shadows; rabbits bigger than he was peeped out of their holes to look at him. His panting sounded fearful in the hooting of owls. His progress became increasingly difficult on the slippery wetness of the soft slopes. And yet he carried on, his chest crushed by the weight of anguish, and in his desire to reach home in time he no longer walked but ran, or tried to run, deep in those unmoving valleys, while the forest continued to cast on him its vast, dark distances.
25 March 2005
Dear readers,
As well as relying on bookshop sales, And Other Stories relies on subscriptions from people like you to tell these other stories – stories that other publishers often consider too risky to take on.
All of our subscribers:
receive a first-edition copy of each of the books they subscribe to
are thanked by name at the end of our subscriber-supported books
receive little extras from us by way of thank you, for example: postcards created by our authors
Become a subscriber, or give a subscription to a friend
Visit andotherstories.org/subscribe to help make our books happen. You can subscribe to books we’re in the process of making. To purchase books we have already published, we urge you to support your local or favourite bookshop and order directly from them – the often unsung heroes of publishing.
Other Ways to Get Involved
If you’d like to know about upcoming events and reading groups (our foreign language reading groups help us choose books to publish, for example) you can:
join the mailing list at: andotherstories.org/join-us
follow us on Twitter: @andothertweets
join us on Facebook: facebook.com/AndOtherStoriesBooks
follow our blog: andotherstoriespublishing.tumblr.com
Current & Upcoming Books
01
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
02
Clemens Meyer, All the Lights
translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
03
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
04
Iosi Havilio, Open Door
translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler
05
Oleg Zaionchkovsky, Happiness is Possible
translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
06
Carlos Gamerro, The Islands
translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett
07
Christoph Simon, Zbinden’s Progress
translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin
08
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
09
Deborah Levy, Black Vodka: ten stories
10
Oleg Pavlov, Captain of the Steppe
translated from the Russian by Ian Appleby
11
Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue
translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry & Stefan Tobler
12
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
13
Iosi Havilio, Paradises
translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler
14
Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative
15
Benjamin Lytal, A Map of Tulsa
16
Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket
17
Elvira Dones, Sworn Virgin
translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
18
Oleg Pavlov, The Matiushin Case
translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
19
Paulo Scott, Nowhere People
translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
20
Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell
21
Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns
translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar
22
SJ Naudé, The Alphabet of Birds
translated from the Afrikaans by the author
23
Niyati Keni, Esperanza Street
24
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World
translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
25
Carlos Gamerro, The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón
translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett
26
Anne Cuneo, Tregian’s Ground
translated from the French by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie
27
Angela Readman, Don’t Try This at Home
28
Ivan Vladislavić, 101 Detectives
29
Oleg Pavlov, Requiem for a Soldier
translated from the Russian by Anna Gunin
30
Haroldo Conti, Southeaster
translated from the Spanish by Jon Lindsay Miles
31
Ivan Vladislavić, The Folly
32
Susana Moreira Marques, Now and at the Hour of Our Death
translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches
33
Lina Wolff, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs
translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry
34
Anakana Schofield, Martin John
35
Joanna Walsh, Vertigo
36
Wolfgang Bauer, Crossing the Sea
translated from the German by Sarah Pybus
with photographs by Stanislav Krupař
37
Various, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets:
Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare
38
Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies
translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
39
César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind
translated from the Spanish by Rosalie Knecht
40
Juan Pablo Villalobos, I’ll Sell You a Dog
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
41
Enrique Vila-Matas, Vampire in Love
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
42
Emmanuelle Pagano, Trysting
translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
43
Arno Geiger, The Old King in His Exile
translated from the German by Stefan Tobler
44
Michelle Tea, Black Wave