Back then, when we were just starting to spend our lives together, or we may have already lived together for some while, though nothing had seemed that certain yet, you asked me several times why I was actually with you. You were sitting in a white armchair next to the bookcase, above your head some coloured bookmarks were poking out of their books, fluttering in the slight draught, and you asked: “Why are you actually with me?” I smiled and declined to answer, or I may have just said something silly like, “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.” In fact, I was slightly offended by the question, disappointed that you could really believe there might be some specific reason that I could extract from the Great Card Index of Reasons, show it to you and then put it back in place, like carefully returning a card to a tarot deck. Why are we actually with one another? Maybe you wanted to hear me name some quality that you thought particularly apt, though for me it could be quite trivial, or perhaps I was expected to mention the manifold pleasures afforded me by the lustre of your youth and the bounties of your body. But I said nothing, sensing there really was no specific reason for my being with you, that there might be some purpose to it, that it was just as it should be and that there really was nothing to add on the subject.
That notwithstanding, if I am now getting round to saying something, it’s for reasons that aren’t easy to explain. We take it that questions of the heart find themselves with no answers, but it could be that the questions and their answers fatally pass each other by in time. I watched you sitting there, looking slightly vexed in the white armchair, then I took a book off the shelf and opened it at the point where the pages were separated by an indigo ribbon. A certain constancy of despair will eventually induce joy. And the same men who live in the monastery of Saint Francis in Fiesola with red flowers in front of them also keep a skull in their cells to nurture their meditation . . . As for me, if ever I sense that my life is about to take a new turn, then the reason for that is not something that I have newly acquired, but something that I have lost. That was what I read that time from Albert Camus’ Notebooks, but the air ruffled by the words merely joined hands with the slight draught and wafted off into the gardens, where it drew in the green fragrance of the grass. Clearly, we’d been given the answer to a different question from the one you had asked. Today I know it was the answer to what I was to ask you several years later: Why are you leaving me? But you said nothing. Did you sense that there was no specific reason, that there might be some purpose to it, that it was just as it should be and that there really was nothing to add on the subject? And that’s about it.
Better, I think, to tell you again, so as not to keep you all in suspense. My only point being to bring back our story as lived.
A world opened to scrutiny
What’s actually still left that remains unknown? I’m sitting on the bench on which I always used to wait for you, killing time trying to find something only I could talk about. It feels nice, the sunlight on my face, but this isn’t a weather thing; the weather matches the forecast and meteorological models, so there’s no need to describe it. People are crisscrossing the square in every direction, the square I might try to capture, but it’s already been captured—on land registry maps, photos, inside cameras, and even in its mutations through time. I might describe the frontages of the surrounding houses, but visualisations of them already exist, and architectural plans and lots of technical drawings showing which way the utilities go. Behind me there’s a dog barking, someone’s just tied him up there for a moment, a spot of nature you might call it, but in the past twelve months alone there’ve been about six hundred dissertations about dogs worldwide and roughly five thousand specialist articles published. Less said the better of the child next to the fountain—its dear little face is actually a battleground of experts, paediatricians, developmental psychologists, educators, dietologists, lawyers, and education advisers who tap their knowledge into the child’s body through the carbon papers of its parents.
And all that is just the old world, that body of matter, that tree stump recently lost beneath a blanket of digital lichen. I might say something about people, sure, but in their pockets they’ve all got a smartphone that says quite enough about them as it is, broadcasting their exact location to several apps at once, which then use algorithms to match that to other data, such as the leisure interests and sexual preferences of subscribers using the same dating website. There is on all of us an overwhelming mass of data that we can’t access; at best we may have vaguely assented to its being gathered and processed, which is anything but vague. It’s a frenzy of description: wherever you look it’s all binary codes, indexed scripts, and algorithms beavering away, not like that gang of workmen over there, just leaning on their spades and eyeing up girls. The niche that is this square has potentially been captured in an exhaustive multidisciplinary study; all it needs now is to choose the right combination out of the available data or, even better, to write a programme that would work with all the other squares in the world. That’s how it is: I’m sitting on a bench in the middle of a perfectly described environment and I might just as well be sitting on any other bench anywhere in the world and it would be exactly the same.
Let’s treat ourselves to a drop of nostalgia. Previously, the job of a writer was similar to what anthropologists do. We would describe worlds and the actions of the people in them. Bronisław Malinowski, one of the founders of anthropology, would advise his followers on fieldwork to note down anything that might be significant. And writers used to do much the same—we’d sit about in the corners of coffee houses, gathering observations into our notebooks, about the milieu, about everything that was going on and might be of interest, because there’s no knowing what might go with what and where it might lead; then there was the dream of the Sum of All Knowledge, fulfilled today at least as a travesty, or of the Total Novel that would contain everything. Except, now, what is there left to the writer-anthropologist or anthropologist-writer in a world where everything is recorded in real time and then stored on servers in buildings the size of airship hangars sunk underground? We live in a world that’s been described in its totality, displayed in its totality, opened to scrutiny in its totality. If, today, we find some previously untouched tribe in Amazonia, we’ll have its chieftain on Oprah Winfrey tomorrow and the content will be shared by hundreds of millions of users of social networks, like when you toss a bit of sausage into an anthill to see if anything happens, and it does, right there and then.
So there’s this man, sitting on a bench and thinking about the woman who’s not going to come back. The only thing that actually remains unknown, or at least somewhat resistant to description and therefore worth writing about, is the field that always opened up between them, that always opened up between us whenever I looked into your eyes and you smiled and waved.
Opportunistic scribblers have proclaimed that Google and Facebook know us better than we know ourselves, and they may be proved right if things go on as they are, but we are still far better at not knowing one another, and it’s this not-knowing that keeps us alive.
And so, I have this sense that the only thing that only I can speak about is you. Of course, not even that is true, because plenty of people can talk about you and plenty of people do; it’s quite maddening how many people talk about you, but nobody talks about you the way I do. And anything else I might say would be just flogging a dead horse, describing what’s been described, telling what’s been told, a Grand Compilation. I’d have to concoct something, a new murder, abomination, holocaust, any story that would prioritise the tension of a fictitious plot over the tension between our eyes. But that’s just old hat taken straight from a screenwriting textbook: have them guessing, give them the odd surprise, build up tension and keep putting off the denouement—cognitive psychology applied to the needs of the culture industry.
Me and you and you
I shall write the sentences: I was first to wake this morning. The sun was once again beating down on the drawn curtains as if it wanted to break them open. I fetched some water from the kitchen and opened them a chink. I sat down in an armchair and focussed my attention on the sleeping Nina. Noting Nina’s breathing. Her head pressed against the pillow. One knee poking out from the duvet. Quietly smacking her lips as she started coming to. Reluctant to open her eyes, her eyelashes like Velcro.
Or might it not be better in the present tense and second person? I’m first to wake this morning. The sun is once again beating down on the drawn curtains as if it wants to break them open. I fetch some water from the kitchen and open them a chink. I sit down in an armchair and focus my attention on you sleeping. Noting your breathing. Your head pressed against the pillow. One knee poking out from the duvet. Quietly smacking your lips as you start coming to. Reluctant to open your eyes, your eyelashes like Velcro.
But do time and person actually matter?
We really have no other option than to conjugate our way up through all the persons back to the infinitive.
It’s as if ’twere me and you, it’s as if ’t were always true, though everything’s different and I’m the first to know it. I’m using your name, Nina, and adding other nouns to it, substantives and non-substantives, attributives, proper nouns and improper, nouns of place and nouns misplaced. I do it to put colour in your cheeks and a sparkle in your eyes; in each chapter I’ll make you up in the mirror of my screen, I’ll smarten you up so you can venture outdoors, and then I’ll select from the wardrobe of language such verbs as will best suit your temperament and little ways.
You’re my character and it’s for me to take care of you. You’re my mannequin, my puppet-on-a-string, my glove puppet, my inflatable doll, who has, come to think of it, as much in common with herself—I say not whether that’s a little or a lot—as a love story has in common with love.
I roam the lines of this book as subject and object at once, and I can scarcely distinguish between one countenance of mine and the other, but you’re here as simply this and that. I may address you now and then, as I’m doing right now, but that means nothing; you’re just a grammatical you that weighs nothing, a second person, but, oh, so second. Nina, Nina, Nina, I write, but it’s like a poem without a flaw, a prayer without fervour, a spell without the magic which, oh, Nina, Nina, Nina, only your genuine presence has imparted to your name. I’m wearing a shaman’s facemask and performing the ritual writing of a love story, using a charred stick in the bed of ash left after a bonfire, but what’s missing is the basic thing that constitutes a liaison: the presence of a second consciousness, that burning fire that is made on a mirror and then melts it down into the form of an oracle.
I have one other hope. All the towns I’m going to build here, all the streets I shall be describing, all the houses whose doors I shall open, and all the rooms in which we’re going to have harsh words, make up, and make love, or so I allege, may be only on paper, but I can at least breathe in them. And likewise, on the other side of the wall of my room to which I occasionally put my ear so as not to go mad, someone will clear their throat now and again, or I might hear the creak of a bed or chair, and even, exceptionally, catch a few words.
I know nothing of that person other than that he’s there, but that suffices. His existence cements my awareness of my own. And so language is what I guard most. It is like a tightrope I’m holding, and I have a sense that if I tug it there’s someone else holding it on the other side; and as long as someone is holding it, I can surely pull it taut and my characters can pass along it hand over hand above the abyss.
In other words, there’s something paradoxical about a novel, particularly about a love story, and that paradox is You. Not you, Nina, my love, you are now but a flatus vocis, a mere string of sounds, a whispering of the memory, a phantom limb that twitches in the night, though it has long been amputated, as if it’s been badly stitched back onto the wrong body. Not you, but You. That’s right, it’s You I’m talking to, it’s You holding the other end of the tightrope, it’s You I sometimes hear with my ear to the wall, hear you breathing as you read.
