You went on gazing at the stranger — frozen, with his hand on his throat. You pressed your hand against the wall, hoping this could somehow save you, while listening to the galloping of a hostile future — that moved along the length of the cool corridor — the specter of an awaited, unwanted, unknown, beloved executioner from whom you did not know how to flee in time.
You went on gazing at the stranger. You gazed long and far away, chased back into the mountains that kept refusing refuge.
• • •
You will run toward the glass building. You’ll fling your jacket over the back of a chair. You’ll see if he’s alive, if he’s somehow still there — the man with the bandage around his neck that you spotted from a crowded bus. You were trembling, eyes wide with fright. You looked bewilderedly at the back of a blue shirt, at the wide strips of rustling tracing paper. You wanted to imagine and then absorb an image able to chase away the phantom that had sprouted in the bus window. But the recently hired engineer was there at his drawing board.
He’ll be there, and you’ll be there on other mornings. You’ll talk and listen. And you’ll receive a ticket to the movies: the danger will come one step closer. You’ll have to comprehend everything that’s incomprehensible, everything that can’t and shouldn’t be understood. And you’ll only ask once, hastily and timidly:
— You were a child during the war, weren’t you?
You won’t expect an answer. And there will be a movie theater, a summer afternoon, and on screen, the border area where the wanderer could no longer escape. Daily war stories flow from the movie screen: smokestacks of crematoria, skeletal bodies, nocturnal hunters, barbed wire, sentinels and executions, howls and hatred, beasts, eyes wide with fright: archives against forgetting, films viewed in respectful silence. The average moviegoer doesn’t want to know more about the war. The people who sit in the dark theater all the time want entertainment. There’s a sob, a squeal from a girl with a short skirt. Ravished in the dark hall, tonight she’ll expend the pain in the frenzy of some dance hall. . When the girl quiets down, an old man dozing in his seat lets out a smothered cry — woken by the thundering of cannons that remind him of the mud of two forgotten wars.
— You were a child during the war, weren’t you?
Blond, thin, and from another era, the boy on the screen looks at himself in the mirror of the well. His mother’s laughter suddenly bursts into the canon peal of water, and long, lonely horses eat apples by the seashore.
The question went unanswered. Your date only wanted to know as much as those cinephiles of summer afternoons, gladly going to the waters of Lethe to forget. He had seen people buried alive and resurrected, detached from despair and hurled into depravity, impatient to touch each other, to rub against each other, to enter each other.
Obsessed once, as he’d said — long ago, in an ancient and forgotten adolescence — by his own capacity for alienation, he’d dashed through his youth, inventing dilemmas and disquietudes for himself, gathering obsessions that could occupy his need to understand — what should be and what shouldn’t, what is and what isn’t — and he doesn’t want to know anything more about the war, he doesn’t want to know it. Words travel with difficulty, detouring around him so that nothing can reach him: slave to oblivion — which shames, humiliates, and soothes — its trophy and glory.
How could he be like the other: the obsessed, the prisoner, and the master of memory, swinging in the past’s vertiginous pendulum, imprisoned by the ravaged waters of impossible forgetting?
He’ll climb the stairs behind you on a summer evening. The door will remain open. Someone should close it behind him. His hand will seek the handle and he will pull, slowly, fearfully, as though anticipating an ambush. He’ll twist the handle till it can go no farther. The bolt should enter the slot unheard, the door should remain stuck in the frame. Almost closed. . pulled slowly, the door nearly flush with the edge. . yet powerless to finish the motion, aligned with the doorframe, noiseless, in perfect silence, without disturbing or awaking. . tiptoeing, eyes lowered to the ground, fingers gripping the handle. . don’t move too suddenly, don’t slam. . everything should flow as silently as a dreamless sleep. Closing the door, the same way each time: frightened, cautious, with humility. . startling at any sound of a slammed door, shaken by the first loud noise, by any powerful gesture. The humiliation of silence, the humiliation and habit of forgetting, the humiliation driven to the point of forgetting. Noiselessly, the door pulled, slowly, in terror, stuck to the wooden doorframe — an interrupted, unfinished, fearful gesture.
You were waiting for a sign from the forever departed, still frozen in your memory so that you might be able to break the curse and detach yourself from the cold that belongs to him. Daughter, orphan — abandoned by whom? Unknown sister of which unknown man? Who squeezes his hands around his throat? Which stranger sends such unremitting alarms that pass hastily down the corridor of your expectations?
You were waiting for a blue shirt. The forgetful passerby, the passenger in permanent haste and change, the wanderer zigzagging across soluble days, without participating and preserving, wandering in a foggy labyrinth and indifferent to where the serpentine pathway leads, docile and foreign to himself, moved by strangers that he’s able to instantly forget, as if he were actually the stranger, the other, elsewhere, in another’s dream. . without parents, without brothers, incapable of keeping a sister.
Your hands descend from the wall and wrap around your body. You belong to no one, and you’re for no one. Orphaned by yourself and by everyone else, you’re a solitary female in a tunnel of silence, crossing paths with them for just one instant. You feel the walls swell, enlarging to the left, to the right, wide enough to allow narrow shoulders through. A dead man’s daughter, prisoner of this death, you’ve delayed absolution, and been terrified by such a useless and drawn-out recovery. Discarded and forced to wait, the dead man is your mirror: he is apparently alive, resembling you and you resembling him, as if the resemblance isn’t another kind of death. Should you all be semblables, the likeness of each other, which is to say made the same, for you (the lone female) to die in the peace of resemblance, in its order, peace, and equality? — the identity frozen, the synchronized howls, a landslide united under the same mask? Let contraries and contradictions perish! Should you remain the daughter of the dead man and the sister of the one not yet alive? Should you draw them closer together under the cover of night? Why should you resemble them when death waits to make us all equal? Unless the dead are somehow trying to call us before the appointed time, unless, in his state of reconciled non-being, the dead coward can’t bear our pride, our living protest, the eulogy of our uniqueness born of solitude.
The despotic vengeance of the one who has strayed into the labyrinths of memory, the putrid prince, burned there and dispersed as smoke, far from you, has become the waves that stop you, make you return, prevent you, rope and rock your thoughts, make you submissive, steal you away. They make time pass, age your bones and gestures, quash your revolts, make your hair fall out and rot your teeth, lower your gaze and dry the leaves and trees and waters nearby, wreck landscapes, murder mountains and miracles — down to the sea itself — and make you resemble him and the stones. Pulverized into the great silence, he no longer knows anything but blank oblivion that covers cadavers and disasters, that doesn’t heal and doesn’t give birth.