Читать книгу The Shadow of Memory - Bernard Comment - Страница 7

Chapter I

So much reading, in vain. Whole afternoons spent raging, crying, sweating, locked into chasing after some scrap of memory, and the next day, nothing. A few crumbs, too weak; the rhythm falls apart, meaning evaporates. Impossible to make so much as the briefest paragraph, the least sentence stick inside my skull. So? Nothing to get upset about, I’ve heard that often enough. And yet, ever since childhood my one desire has been to get to know things just as quickly as possible. Learn, for that matter, everything from before in order to begin to think here, now. A question of mental aptitude, talent. I wasn’t gifted. But by working at it . . . Hope wasn’t necessarily forbidden, especially since it turned out that I had an astonishing ability to store up the most minute details of events I’d been through in real life, my own experiences or feelings, like a film in my memory, interminable reels that I was always coming into partway through. Mattilda was amazed to hear me describe past situations this way, so precisely: our first nights, a gesture, a fragrance. She’d joke about it: “You do pretty well for an amnesiac.” I didn’t dare tell her, this woman who’d been my friend since childhood, this lover, that it wasn’t that kind of memory that concerned me; rather it was remembering books, works, the heritage to which we were the potential heirs. Yes, the language of others, the one language that counts, language that is authoritative. The veins and nerves of thought.

I’d finally decided to start using a computer again, a reliable medium with guaranteed retention. This would become my main occupation and went like this: stuff the machine full, stockpiling data, filling in the blanks, one after the other, with knowledge, with history, until I’m back at the present. To do that I first had to make a decision and start the process from some predetermined point. I chose the Renaissance, specifically the Italian Renaissance, which would create a platform for me to get things going with genealogies that started there and continued through every proceeding current and movement. For two years now, soon three, I’ve made innumerable entries, opened countless files in order to learn how to see, how to sustain my gaze. I was not even trying to understand, weave a fabric, or attempt a synthesis. But, above all, was browsing assiduously, in order to accumulate my material. A massive amount of material.

It’s this, my desire for the past, a past no longer eluding me, one I’d be able to use in the present, that I’d have liked to tell Robert about, as an introduction, the day we met. But I’ve never been able to talk to anybody—an incurable speech impediment. I stammered, desperately trying to construct a few coherent sentences. Ideas became tangled, I forgot what was to come next, no words came. With the result that the old man, perhaps, understood none of my explanations. But he’d sensed that the problem was memory. A pathological obsession. He smiled, rather tenderly, I think, and kindly.

Yes, Robert. On a Saturday, of course. The only day that, because of my work, I could go to the Bibliothèque nationale. In addition to the classes at the university, which I attended less and less, I’d taken a job in an office, working with computers, word processing, indexing capital and transactions. It had the advantage of giving me access to all the equipment at the end of the afternoon after the office closed. Lots of keyboards, juxtaposed screens, accelerated printing. Sometimes I’d stay there until late at night, running out for a sandwich after saving what I’d typed in. I was buzzing with information, dizzy in the face of the vast array of characters that were going to flow, invisible but definitely real, into their little plastic medium. On Saturdays, however, the offices underwent their weekly cleaning; I took advantage of this to go to the source, to feed my memory, or at least the machines’ memories. I was working my way through the Bibliothèque nationale using a method that was simultaneously thematic, alphabetical, and chronological. For the fifteenth century an alphabetical search wasn’t always sufficient; I had to venture into places that were very hard to reach; specifically, the lair of the monks. Damned Benedictines, you had to show them your pure white paws and justify your desire to read. They probably thought I was a little too young and healthy to have access to their carefully sequestered knowledge, so seldom exposed to the air. No question of using a computer, of course. I remember their frightened eyes; they really found me repugnant and, when they discovered my little laptop, thought they were in the presence of the devil himself. Their new crusade! From that point on they never stopped watching me, rummaging repeatedly through my briefcase, as well as my jacket, my raincoat, probably imagining that even tinier gadgets of that sort had been made to spy on them on behalf of the Franciscans, the libertines, the philistines, the Americans, or perhaps the Japanese or other Asians, to violate their treasure, their memory, and divulge their archives to the world. Luckily, when I reached to the sixteenth century those expeditions became less frequent, thanks to Gutenberg.

So it was at the Bibliothèque nationale on a cold, rainy morning. Just by chance. It could equally well not have happened. Which in some ways, in some sense, would have been better. I was sitting at a table, a little off to the side, my favorite place despite the lack of light. An old man came up to me, impatient, nervous, as I was reading my books for the day. I didn’t understand what he wanted, the words were pouring out too fast and some of them got lost in his muted voice. I wondered what this stranger could be after, his overwhelming silhouette backlit by the ceiling lights. He had leaned further forward, right next to me, I smelled something musty, the smell of decay, rain on dust probably, especially in his mouth, a real stink that made me turn my head a bit, warding it off with my hand. His gaze, focused, caught one of my eyes, held it intensely for a few seconds then abandoned its prey, seized the other, then sometimes both at the same time, as if to bore into me and then absorb me, as if to put a spell on me. He examined the two volumes I was consulting as well as my tools, he must have been disturbed by the miniature technology. One of the librarians, obliterated in his shadow, tried to explain what was going on, but the old man wouldn’t give him a chance, blocked his way, soon speaking at a more than conversational volume, he would have ended up yelling, screaming I think, if our neighbors, as well as the uncomfortable employee, hadn’t quickly made him quiet down.

“Let you have these manuscripts? But I’m working on them, these exact ones, to . . . to . . . put them in . . . store them in my memory. I’m trying to make sense of them, it isn’t very . . . and it’s the only day that . . . No, really . . . And I don’t have an alternative project, I can’t just move on to something else.” It wasn’t even ten o’clock! Then Robert wheeled out arguments about age, fatigue, illness, how hard it was for him to get around, he didn’t live in the center of town so it was a real expedition on foot. He’d have to come back, all that wasted energy, almost an entire day, whereas I was young, it would be less of a problem for me, and a whole bunch of other stuff like that. His tone of voice kept changing unpredictably. Soon I just didn’t know what to say in response. I gave up. He’d taken the manuscripts in question and gone to a table nearby, also off to the side. Actually, it was the librarian himself who had carried the volumes and, all smiles, bowing and scraping, very considerately set him up. As for me, I still had my laptop, very handy, but nothing to put into it. Blank. I could have gone back home to Mattilda. How happy she’d have been! She always loved surprises, anything unexpected. Which is why she had a hard time putting up with my orderly, methodical temperament, my endless obsession with work, nights devoured by my appetite for knowledge. Yes, I could have gone back to be with Mattilda. Everything would have been simpler, I would have gotten some points and everything else would have remained as before. But no! I went through the main card catalogue, took down a few new shelving numbers and references in order to do some follow-up work. I also flipped through the journals that were on display, as if to kill some time.

The old man stood there in his raincoat in that huge, overheated room; bent over and rapidly copying things down in a little notebook, he was no doubt perspiring terribly. He’d never even taken his cap, or rather beret, off. Obviously just passing through. He’d carefully closed the disputed volumes rather quickly and now seemed to be thinking about something. He probably noticed that I was watching him. When I headed toward the checkout desk and then the exit he followed me so we then met up again in the entrance hall. A bit of awkwardness, hesitation. He thanked me, rather coldly. I didn’t know what attitude I should take, how to follow up, and we were about to go our separate ways. But suddenly he asked me, in somewhat reproachful tones, why I was reading those particular manuscripts. What possible interest could I have in those accounts of voyages with no literary value, in dated diplomatic papers, boring, full of descriptions of works that had, more likely than not, vanished or themselves been judged to be minor. How was I even aware that they existed? He gave the impression of being sincerely surprised, dumbfounded, as if confronted by some truly insoluble mystery or aberration. I couldn’t think how to answer him, or rather I carefully avoided admitting to him that it was all by chance. Chronology, Mannerism, and the letter P as in Pontormo. A strange guy, the gifted student of the best studios in the great Florentine adventure that was nearing its end. I’d been deep in his story for several weeks and very much liked the few pictures of his I’d seen. Of everything that I’d crammed in, that is to say almost two centuries’ worth now, piles of diskettes, he was my favorite, Pontormo, even more than Michelangelo and the other great names. But I couldn’t have said why, since I’d only read Vasari’s not very precise text on the subject. As for the manuscript that seemed of such concern to Robert, I’d found it mentioned in a bibliographical index that was itself pretty old, where it was described as being one of the rare serious and accurate documents about some frescos by Pontormo that had since vanished, although some preliminary sketches for them had survived that I’d been able to see and found fascinating, intriguing. What more could I tell him?

At the moment he was bombarding me with questions: had I had a chance to admire the Visitation, the Deposition? And that wonderful Annunciation, the incredible, casual turn of the angel’s head, the flawless, veiled expression of the Virgin. Had I spent the requisite amount of time admiring them? As if, my friend, I had time to go in person to museums, chapels! If I went through every painter like that I wouldn’t go fast enough, and there was still the problem that in order to appreciate and benefit from seeing something in real life, you had to know something, be cultivated. But, as for me I didn’t know anything, not yet. He finally asked me what it was about Pontormo that I liked. I’d never bothered to justify my tastes or the things I found interesting. So I suggested: the colors. Those oranges and greens. Then I added: the drawings, brilliant yet subtle. The ones I’d seen again that very morning came to mind. Faced with silence on his part I threw out another idea that I found meaningful. Mannerism . . . finally, it would have been possible . . . a key moment . . . a kind of memory of painting . . . a first synthesis. Several aspects, often contradictory, inherited from the past . . . and put together in an attempt to attain an ideal beauty. Yes, painting with an active memory! But Robert interrupted me in a loud, resounding voice. He suggested first going to get a coffee, or rather, ice cream. We’d be able to chat more comfortably.

We hadn’t yet left the big reception room of the library when he began going into things at length. “Ah! Pontormo’s sketches! The ones for the choir dedicated to San Lorenzo, his final work . . . Luckily we still have those! The ones of the Flood are the wildest, with their clusters of bodies, coiling, writhing spirals, not a single bit of free air in a great mass of undulation, nothing but an agglomeration of flesh twisting in unlikely ways, and those crazed expressions, eyes that are lost in huge black sockets but still look at us, look at us. And bear witness, perhaps. Dazzling intuition, that in a flood bodies would be deformed as they became swollen by the water, the people, huge interlocking and blistered pouches, are caught at the very last moment before they burst. Those lines, those shadows have to be closely examined, the dispersed limbs decoded, the feeble sway, faces distraught, carried away in a whirlpool of postures that burst apart, where any system to sort them out collapses. The flood! That’s where we’ll find ourselves, young man . . . Inevitably. Well, did you know that that damn Pontormo, in order to observe, in the best way conceivable, shall we say, the capacities of a sunken body, to test its elasticity, its receptiveness, to experience it completely, to see the results of this whole flood business, when everything drowns and drifts off with the final tide, yes, just in order to admire the process, he preserved cadavers in troughs filled with water where he soaked them long enough to stink up the neighborhood with the stench of his experiments . . . There you have it! That’s a pretty peculiar way of working, don’t you think? One way to arrive at an outcome, meeting the problem head-on without flinching. In those days they weren’t too sensitive about hygiene, not yet having discovered any of our contemporary medical certainties, let alone the pseudo-truths of science! In those days you could certainly get away with just using your imagination alone to depict the sloughed-off mortal coils of your fellow men—people would swallow it! What, you never read about that? Pontormo’s astonishing laboratory? And yet, there are severable credible sources that attest to it, there was even some talk among ecclesiastics at the time. Because the church, being both Pontormo’s sponsor and the venue in which his work was executed, was concerned on both counts. Just imagine the scene! On the one hand there was the anxious clergy, suspicious. On the other, the already aged painter, sick and nauseated as often as not, obsessed by what he eats and drinks, fearful of excess, afraid he too will explode. He can feel it coming, death, he’s intrigued by it. Absorbed by his frescoes, huge, interminable, the job he’s been working to complete for twelve years, hidden from sight, he no longer meets with anyone. Relentless worker, that fellow! And when he goes home at night, there too he shuts himself in and plunges into his experiments, moving his cadavers around with a big stick, regrouping them, stirring them up, oblivious to the smell. He can’t smell anything anymore, or else he just doesn’t care: he sees. A fantastic composition of decomposition. So then, memory? A painter of memory? Other ‘mannerist’ painters perhaps—students, rivals, drawing their art from the combined successes of the past. But not Pontormo! Only the present, his present, absolute, unprecedented. To the point of going to see, directly, exactly how it happens, from the point of view of death and what follows death, under certain set conditions.”

It was raining, I’d suggested taking a bus. His icecream shop, the best in the city, wasn’t particularly close and that way we’d avoid the puddles. But Robert would hear none of it, in spite of the persistent cold that had gone on for too many days now. After all those stories about the South, the sun, the fine weather, this year was pretty much a washout. What’s more, this happens every year. But no one’s ever willing to admit it. For people living in the city, for the tourists, for everybody in short, the South ought to be warm. They can’t make that claim anymore. “No winter” is just something they say, as if to convince themselves of it. And now here’s this old man suggesting ice cream! I couldn’t, however, refuse. I didn’t want to interrupt him; there was so much knowledge inside his head, right there, ready, instantly available, that he intimidated me. How unlike my machine and my laborious manipulations. So we walked along like this through the tiny, rain-spattered streets and the ends of some of his sentences got lost in the raging wind sweeping through from all directions, lashing against our faces. I’d have liked him to talk even longer and only regretted that I couldn’t be noting it all down, because I imagined that I would forget all, or almost all of it. This, however, was a unique moment of sudden acceleration in the construction of my memory. Because he seemed to know everything, this old man.

Pontormo had to be his passion, his idol considering the way he talked about him, and the way he’d fly off the handle about those who had neglected or scorned him. “That they could have dared get rid of the San Lorenzo frescoes! Twelve years of stubborn, exhausting labor, dozens of square yards in a final act of defiance! It’s a miracle that the sketches have been preserved. Especially since his preliminary drawings are masterpieces more often than not! Just as they are, with those outlandish faces, those people caught in the most incredible positions, the movement of a split-second. And not just the sketches of the Last Judgment. Remember the ones for Vertumnus and Pomona, his first big fresco commission, studies in black stone, magnificent. Bodies suspended between flying and falling. Because that’s really what’s extraordinary about them: they act as if they weren’t falling, or not necessarily falling. Not being accountable to weight, or any other law, human, physical, or scientific!” And at this he waved his arms in great volutes and scrolls suddenly interrupted by somebody’s clumsy umbrella. Robert very nearly got himself hurt. In any event, the old man’s fervor was cut short. Or maybe he’d finished with Pontormo.

Robert, to go on with our conversation, asked me what I did for a living. Feeling that I was protected by his verbosity, snugly enclosed in my listening and admiring, I wasn’t expecting any questions. I tried to answer, my words incoherent because my mouth was numb from the cold: a few beginnings of sentences, computers, something I was studying, a memory.

“Ah! Computers . . . Why not? Just as long as you can include value, values, in your system—the exclamation marks rising like little gasps in the pervasive drone! Yes, a permanent classification, and personal! Otherwise, you just make the same error as our public institutions, those huge, anonymous, sterile dumping grounds called public libraries. I didn’t dare say this to you just now, with that library employee standing right behind me, but . . . I hate those places. Oh yes. I call a library ‘public’ the moment it gets out of the hands of a single individual. As if it were possible to share a collection of books, how they’re classified, what’s next to what, that very particular set of relationships . . . and shared in huge numbers, can’t halt progress, international connections! You must have heard about that? Soon all the big libraries are to be connected, a huge tide of monitors, a standardized procession of texts on recycled paper, all in the same typeface, regardless of genre, rhythm, tone. Watch out! It seems incredible, but ten, twenty years from now manuscripts will be relegated to cellars, reformatted onto diskettes or cassettes! The book, its texture, its flavor—done for. Machines to grind them up until they’re one-dimensional, passionless, and so can be ingested more quickly. But there’s no one rebelling against this, nobody even considers it surprising!” We were already where we were going—which seemed to astonish him. But he wasn’t done with his rage. “A beautiful, deathly place, their mausoleums for printed matter! Huge temples of pseudo-sharing! Or real sharing, because in the final analysis all that’s there is, cadavers, decaying carcasses, and those can be split up as much as you like, since they aren’t alive at all. That, you’ll see, is something entirely different; it’s impossible to share a living book, living in itself or in you. Impossible!”

It was nice and warm inside the ice cream shop when we went inside after our painful trek across the city, its narrow alleyways, made all the more rapid by the raging rivulets of rain. I didn’t like libraries either. Was physically incapable of remaining inside them except in little, homeopathic doses, and at the cost of persistent discomfort. But my reasons would certainly turn out to be less noble than his. What I couldn’t stand was to see that insatiable crowd reading books I didn’t know, or anyhow not yet, ones I’d perhaps never know and frequently whose titles I didn’t even recognize. Yes, discouraging, all those people who served to tally the cruel depth of my omissions, the scope of the task I had yet to complete. As for those holding in their hands a volume I’d already read and assimilated, that wasn’t much better. In fact worse. Were they paying attention to such and such detail? Were they noticing the same bits as I? Or were they focusing on others I might have missed? I’d set the process of remembering in motion like a test whose outcome would be nothing but a painful collapse into forgetfulness, then nothing: no memory, no echo, just barely a code, the title of a diskette, put away somewhere for later, much later. However, there with Robert, I merely agreed, a library was indeed not an easy space to share, in any case, it posed some problems. As for the rest of it, I had no fixed notions. Actually, his point of view seemed exaggerated to me, affected. But his breakneck recitation had brought him to the boiling point and I wanted both to calm him down and, at all costs, to avoid a prolonged discussion—hardly a treat in the frigid air of their so-called South.

He wanted to sit in the back, the very back of the room, on the soft banquette that seemed to be holding up the huge mirror occupying that entire wall. We could watch the customers in peace from there. Ice cream, now! That, I should have realized immediately, was a sign that there was something the matter with this old man. But he was insistent, even denying me the right simply to drink a café or some herbal tea. So I thought up a combination. Sabayon! And chocolate, and wild berry! Usually I’d order pineapple, and banana, and raspberry; that is, on the very few times I came here with Mattilda for a special treat. But that day conditions were so different, you might say exotic, that I wanted to have something new, befitting the moment.

“What? But you’re not thinking! What a heresy! You can get by with the generous charms of sabayon together with the rather heavy softness of chocolate, that’s entirely justifiable, one could easily go along with you there. But then to add the woodsy freshness of berries . . . Two absolutely incompatible registers! Of course, no computer will teach you that. But it’s obvious, young man, obvious. A mixture of that sort should have put out your eyes before it ever collided with your palate. Color is everything, think about it! And not just in terms of painting, or Mannerism. Synesthesia rather. With even the least bit of imagination, of perceptiveness, you’d never have made that mistake. Isn’t just seeing the colors sufficient evidence of the correct way to combine them? Doesn’t their chromatic harmony foreshadow their flavors? Just consider the countless possible combinations, some of which play on the slightest pastel nuances, building slowly to their full effect. Melon, banana, and cream, for example, to which, if it’s a really special occasion, one might add something like hazelnut, or walnut, or coconut. Still, it’s a good idea not to rely blindly on colors, or shades either. There’s nothing systematic about any of this! Pineapple, or lemon, despite their delicate appearance, are disastrously aggressive in creamy compositions. Generally speaking, that’s the problem with putting fruit flavors together; it results in terrible wounds to our taste buds and optic discs alike. Let’s assume it’s black currant, raspberry, apricot. A seductive mixture, but horribly overpowering!” And that was nothing. A mere step away from the cathedral he’d found a snack bar selling fluorescent ice cream! “Anyhow, that probably wouldn’t bother you, wouldn’t seem particularly shocking considering your explosive mixture of ice cream—and your computer. Very trendy! Poor Pontormo . . .”

He spat out his words, completely carried away with these thoughts. I couldn’t take my eyes off his contorted lips, his nose with its protuberant tip. And his predatory eyes, a surprisingly lively, glittering contrast in the midst of worn, old skin that seemed almost rotten. Why was he telling me all this stuff, about painting, ice cream, colors? And so fast? Would he never stop talking? A few more tirades against America, which, not content with its first landing, was still invading us; attacks too against the general sloppiness, the guilty tolerance, the disappearance of refinement in every shape and form. Then he was silent, a few minutes. He seemed out of breath, empty. His eyes had suddenly lost their electricity, his eyelids were suddenly heavy. And what could I say in response? That I’d never given it a thought? As for computers, I was no more a believer in them than he, and would willingly forego mine if I had the least bit of memory to rely on, even just a shred of his, for example, but for me they’re an important tool, my only hope for my automatic, chronic amnesia. He should have understood! But no, that’s precisely it. The man who knew everything could never understand, couldn’t share my anxieties. I chose to be silent, not even smile. Simply to prolong my moment of calm. I also could have left. Mattilda would be getting impatient. There I was, stealing precious time from her while the afternoon was well underway. Meanwhile, this old man, I didn’t even know him, nothing about him should have been of concern to me. I’d been accommodating with him, respectful, and he was trying to offend me. All his theories about ice cream were all well and good! But, in the end, to each his own as far as whims and tastes are concerned! We ended up having another little something, coffee for me and he had an herb tea I think, and a piece of pastry. During this long silence his face recomposed itself around its long, deep, and mostly vertical wrinkles, the marks of joy or stress.

We started to discuss painting again. He referred to paintings in such unbelievable detail that you’d think he’d gone through museums with a magnifying glass, and done the same with texts. But his attention was being drawn more and more to the counter, until he was completely absorbed by it. “Look at the children! They’re the ones I come here to watch, how bedazzled they are, looking at all the flavors of ice cream and not knowing which one to choose and dreaming of tasting them all. A splendid treat! I’ll spare you an extensive catalogue of their different postures, the faces they make, the way their eyes sparkle. I’ve been studying them for more than forty years . . . It would, however, be unspeakably idiotic to think, or make anybody else think, that all kids are necessarily adorable and charming and touching. Not at all! Some of them are rotten. The ones who are obese and blasé, for example, nothing there but a mechanical satisfaction of appetites that doesn’t even involve desire. They need a few good spankings to teach them how to get their guts under control at last and get the glandular machinery going again. As for the others, the whiners and snifflers? The droolers and the ones who talk talk talk, the sleepy ones, the ones with bad manners? In fact, the majority of children resembles the majority of adults, faces set already in hollow grimaces, nothing to be proud of. Second-rate cruelty passed on and intensified, traces of the fathers, traces of the mothers, dreary little lives in perspective. Have you noticed how subtle our French language is? How different forms of one word can mean such different things? Gris means dreary but griser means to intoxicate, a vie grisante being an intoxicating life. Verb versus adjective! But to move from the dreary to the intoxicating, you have to take a risk, open your eyes, scare yourself, confront all sorts of things, seeing and contemplating all their possible repercussions, like old Pontormo, him again, that was a truly intoxicating life, in full color. But those people? The common run of mortals? Just look at them! Gray, lackluster. Shifty eyes. Their lips folded, closed up tight, sagging at both corners, shrouded in a lack of curiosity right down to their muscles. Dead people who’ve plainly never been alive, a dreary plain glutted with the living dead. A dreary mass, the Great Drear, a gigantic waiting room devoted to the preservation of the species. Children? Fewer and fewer! Parents grow more and more adolescent, their progeny more and more adult. Soon, what else can you expect, they’ll all meet up at the same stupid age.” And on and on he went; at that rate we could have spent the whole day on the subject. Robert gave the impression of having thought about everything, of never being caught off guard. It was hard for me to keep listening to him, because I’d long ago exceeded my maximum ability to absorb anything.

He lowered his voice then, without warning, its tone became dreamy and sad. “The terrible thing is that today looking at children has to be clandestine, one can only admire them furtively. With all the stories going around—kidnappings, poisonings, rapes, ransoms, traumas, people are wary: parents, neighbors, everybody on the lookout. A stare that lasts a bit too long, is too tender, a wink, a friendly gesture, and instantly you’re suspected of pedophilia, armed robbery; they laugh nervously, vindictively and whisk the child away. Kids themselves become fearful, they’ve succeeded in ruining their innocence. Growing old just to reach the point at which you can’t look at children anymore! Anyhow, like I said, pretty soon there won’t be any more children. So that won’t even be a problem.”

He sighed, shook his head, overcome. He must have been thinking about some particular event or individual. “Let’s go, it’s late. You’ve been very nice this morning, so helpful. About Pontormo, this place, the children. I haven’t let you say much . . . Nonetheless, your version of Mannerism and knowledge. Very strange. Maybe I didn’t really get it. But there’s something fascinating, about your . . . fascination! It’s hard to define. We can discuss it some more, and I may, perhaps, have a proposal to make you. Come to my place, some evening, this week. Wednesday.” Robert smiled. It was an order.