Читать книгу The Past Ahead - Gilbert Gatore - Страница 10

1. “Dear stranger, welcome to this narrative. I should warn you that if, before you take one step, you feel the need to perceive the indistinct line that separates fact from fiction, memory from imagination; if logic and meaning seem one and the same thing to you; and, lastly, if anticipation is the basis for your interest, you may well find this journey unbearable.”

Your gaze falls on her, motionless yet alert. Unaware of the secret she hides you don’t censure your mocking thoughts. She looks like a giant bird, the kind that balances on one foot for days on end. You dare not laugh at the image. Your presence must remain circumspect, unnoticeable.

The silky darkness, at odds with the ray of light from the window, only allows you to discern her silhouette and the profile of her face.

Her silence begs you to stay with her, and somehow you know this is not the time to refuse her anything. So you stay, frozen in place and absorbed as she is. In the settling stillness it seems that your spirits meet. Nothing you discover about her (and how would you? you avoid the question) takes you by surprise.

She remembers the first words of the narrative she had no idea would so outstrip her when she began. “Dear stranger, welcome to this narrative, whose only survivor will be you,” she’d first jotted down in the corner of a sheet of paper. Then she’d hesitated. The introduction was too violent. “Don’t add any verbal violence to that of the facts,” she remembered. She ended up choosing words of caution that didn’t satisfy her. Too indirect. Even today she isn’t pleased, but she’s accepted the idea of letting the text stand.

She began to write a few days earlier, the evening when, for a completely different reason, she locked herself in here. Without any warning the words spilled all over each other inside her arm, immediately demanding the repose they sought in the small notebook directly in front of her. She can still feel the trace of their violent and acrid rush through her veins. For hours before she began writing she had clutched her pencil between her fingers, like a fistful of massive tidying needs, where so many things had piled up for so long and in such disorder that she couldn’t open it without everything tumbling out to crush her. Weary, she had loosened her grip at last. The sheets of paper scattered around the room are the result of this outpouring.

She isn’t writing today. She has unleashed the flow of words and the thoughts they express, like bloodletting.

Useless to herself hereafter, she remembers. Like a new commander reviewing his regiment to establish his authority, she visits her memories one by one. She’s afraid of indifference. She’s afraid she’s been defeated. But this feeling is merely a pointless reflex, for in the final analysis, it is no longer up to her to advance or retreat. She’s been launched, and she’ll be crushed. She is no longer anything but the example of a law of which you are the indispensable observer.

Sitting straight on her stool, an unmoving image, she thinks that if she reflects long enough and is sufficiently stubborn she might end up understanding something. Actually, she’s moving among images she forces herself to register in a clear order, images upon which she hopes she will impose herself once and for all. As she thinks this she can’t help but wonder whether it isn’t she who is being visited, scrutinized, and subdued by her memories rather than the other way around.