Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 15

But my story, the story of The Faraways, is just beginning or, better, I am, here and now, beginning to begin it. Forgive all these preliminary words. I justify them saying they are the cautious whispers of someone who doesn’t dare flip certain switches known to activate certain memories.

Memory like that inexplicable time-machine and the past like a fourth dimension and an alternate planet containing life slightly more intelligent than the life inhabiting the present.

For in the past (arriving there so much later—the horrifying thing about the past—because we can only see it from the future) we’re all wiser.

Traveling to what already was, we comprehend effortlessly and contemplate with clarity, errors that, in truth, we cannot and won’t ever be able to correct. But at least we get the consolation prize or the agonizing punishment of knowing exactly how we could’ve done better, how we could’ve changed to improve the results, altering certain factors or making different decisions. Looking back, there are many who, before using and, maybe, getting hooked on the powerful drug that is the past, opt instead for another drug: oblivion.

And then, I suppose, they inhabit an eternity of sunsets, always new and unique.

Thus, life lasts but a day and then starts over.

That isn’t, hasn’t been, and won’t be my case.

The acute perceptions of memory’s disruptions, of irregularities of the heart—the palpitations of time that now crawl, then run, and later fly—have always been my pleasure, my privilege, and my condemnation.

Memory is an astronaut struggling to establish lasting connections between the stars, many of which are dead; but the act of remembering them lights up points in a space that, though distant and out of reach, still form part of the proximal yet elusive nebulas of our thoughts. To remember is to discover without ceasing to search. We don’t know if a memory is something we give up for lost just as we remember it, or, if it’s something lost that we suddenly recover.

And perhaps the oddest part of all (or maybe most normal, because distortions of space-time are one of the genre’s most recurrent clichés) is that now, when my memory aches with the acute, throbbing pain of its own loss, I am trying to remember through writing what I no longer remember unless I use my hands.

And I don’t do it with the utilitarian and almost telegraphic language of science fiction.

I am referring to that style that is really an absence of style, where what actually matters is plot, a good idea, a new prophecy. Perpetual interest in the future but such primitive writing.

No: my lines are long and sinuous (parenthesis functioning like the pincers of crustaceans made hubristic and swollen by Epsilon Rays), more like those of an experimental yet inexperienced nineteenth-century gentleman at the turn of a new century.

Once again, the past.

How they wrote in the past when books could count on all their reader’s time and all the time in the world fit inside those books that were so difficult to escape from; because so much more took place inside them than outside them. Books for a reader from an era that was ending so another era, ready to establish the idea and the theory of a distant future, could begin.

And, so, a new and paradoxical conviction that, by prolonging our lives, the future would not only stay far away, but we would be able to arrive there.

So, a mutating reader, suspended between two phases.

A removed reader with access to everything.

Someone who would soon discover—amid the explosions of a Great War, supposedly unique and final—not only that the future was expanding, but that time was accelerating.

Someone who—despite never having had the right tools to imagine complicated teletransportors or galactic highways wrecked by black holes—was soon flung onto the continuum of an age of gears and levers and inventions, ready to do what’s necessary in reality in order to disobey and rebel in fiction.

Back then, I imagine, the air was flammable and sparks flew when lover’s lips touched, for kisses were historic and electric. Static electricity moving everywhere and suddenly anything could trigger combustions both external and internal.

But I must insist: why do I write these long, serpentine sentences, these blurry images laden with adjectives, why do I think that this, that all of this happened, that all of this happened to me, and yet . . .

Patience, be patient, is it all right to ask for patience the way one asks for mercy, swearing you’ll put everything in order soon or die trying?

Here and now—maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why I write this way—I am also like this: the long lines and brief thoughts of someone who has surrendered to the reign of machines, not understanding them, but using them. Using them, but never quite forgetting that he won’t ever fully understand exactly what electricity is (animal or vegetal or mineral?) or how the simplest motor works. Someone for whom airplanes will always be elevators without cables. A man on the edge, a frontiersman, someone who’s not exactly anywhere, but who sees everything from a perspective more shifting than privileged, and yet . . .

I write all of this amid the inaudible din of a secret battle I know is already lost.

I write this in an attempt to overcome the forgetfulness that washes over me like a black tide, like something blotting out the stars. Stars going out one by one, like worn out names that have been used and repeated so many times that their corresponding faces have faded. A blackness that hangs over me and drowns me and at first I try to stay afloat, but before long, I understand that there’s no sense in resisting the call of the depths and oblivion and I let myself go, I sink, liquid air bubbles escaping from my lips and out through my scuba suit.

I write so that all of this functions like the debris of a shipwreck readying to come up to the surface while, on the other side of the river, a column of black smoke rises, dancing to the music of red sirens in a city where, tonight, no one will sleep.

Diffuse fragments, yes, but pieces of the same hull and from the same head that can maybe offer some idea of what it was that sank or, at least, serve to indicate the more or less exact spot where there lies, motionless, everything that once sailed, guided by charts, compasses, and constellations.

I write to leave something behind, not to clarify what happened, not to help me remember (I can almost see myself here after a time, as if I’d decided not to go but to stay, reading these pages, understanding nothing of the little they contain and only a little of the nothing they attempt to explain).

I write like someone saying goodbye.

I write all of this that I never planned to write. A good part of it I don’t even write, but just think, that elusive and pure form of writing that is unadulterated memory, rare nostalgic energy, its workings incomprehensible until it’s put down in writing, reduced to disconnected words. I write propelled by the reactive fuel of an unexpected visitor.

I write, opening and closing parenthesis (maybe, borrowing those parenthesis that embrace numbers and letters but not words, to approximate my uncertain language with mathematic precision, with the exactitude that Ezra has surrendered to in order to define the contours of the diffuse), the way I closed my roll top desk when I heard someone knocking.

And I got up and went down to open the door.

A young journalist.

Though I call him a “young journalist,” the truth is I don’t believe he was a journalist in the strictest and most professional sense of the term.

I don’t believe, as he stated, that he worked for a “specialty” magazine because, as far as I know, magazines “specializing” in science fiction no longer exist and, if one had survived it wouldn’t devote its limited pages to interviewing antiques, but to featuring the exchange of opinions between fans more interested in the special affect produced by the special effects—all that erotic, digitalized technology to dig their fingers into—of the next big, frigid blockbuster of the hot summer.

I didn’t believe him when he showed up at my home without calling ahead; so I made him swallow the bitter pill of convincing me of the veracity of his alleged credentials.

I preferred to think of him, simply, as someone who needed to imperiously ask many questions (questions he’d asked himself many times, silent and alone), in order to, if possible, hear the perfect answers in the voice of a stranger he knew—without ever having spoken to him—all too well.

A young journalist (I don’t think he was exactly “young” either; but it’s also true that I’ve reached an age when nearly all living beings are, or appear to be, quite young compared to me) paid me a visit today and asked many questions about things that happened long, long ago.

At first I imagined his small notepad contained, written in an illegible hand, words cut in half, more disjointed than abbreviated, a long list of questions revolving—as so often happened back then, on the rare occasions I let myself be cornered and caught—around the figure of Warren Wilbur Zack. His life so different from mine. An opposite life. An anti-life. Everything that happened to him—reading aloud by the light of his last wish—like everything that never happened to me and . . .

Here, I believe, a pause is in order.

A pause, like these other empty parenthesis where—paragraph after paragraph—I think I glimpse the true texture of time. Pauses like the antimatter matter between one space-time leap and the next, like the moment when the pieces rotate into place and slide into the grooves of the complicated mechanism of what we decide to remember or what decides to be remembered.

One more pause before I allow myself to think about Zack . . .