Sunday
An incredible, sunny spring day on which Rosa is in Turin and I am home alone and decide to lower the blinds and do without the happy, festive day, purely because I have an impression of absolute freedom, that I can do whatever I feel like, and the only thing I really feel like doing is not being too free and shutting myself up in darkness, thinking about Kafka and this dictionary where I try to comment on the world with my favorite diarists and which, if I am not careful, could turn into one of those texts commenting unendingly on the world.
I don’t think anyone is more literature-sick than Kafka. His diary is terrifying. At eight in the morning, he would arrive punctually at his office. He would write documents and reports, make inspections. He worked there, in that crowd of miserable workers and employees, where his superiors did not know him, only because he knew that he should not devote all his time to literature. He was afraid that literature would suck him in, like a whirlpool, causing him to lose his bearings in its limitless expanse. He could not be free, he needed a limitation, to have all the time to write struck him as dangerous, terrible. He would return to his parents’ home at about quarter-past two in the afternoon. He said that he felt like a stranger, although he had great love for his family, parents, and sisters. From time to time it occurred to him that he should move away from his friends and do so without the slightest consideration, become enemies with everyone, talk to no one. Other times, the opposite: he sought out his friends or favorite writers to establish a dialogue and to begin to comment unendingly on the world, as if what he wanted was to reach the source of all writing.
An incredible spring Sunday on which I close the windows and reread The Castle, a novel that cannot end, among other reasons because in it the Surveyor does not travel from one place to another, but from one interpretation to another, from one commentary to another. The Surveyor pauses at every bend in the imaginary road and comments on everything. One has the impression that he writes in order to reach the source of all writing, and in the meantime — in a series of commentaries that become endless — he comments on the world. He seems always to be searching for the first person to name something, for the original source. He strives to find the first to write something, the man who wrote the first word or phrase. But, for this, he must take on three thousand years of writing. Unlike Don Quixote, Kafka’s novel is not explicitly about books — K. is a surveyor, not a reader or writer — and so does not suffer from Montano’s malady or pose problems relating to writing; it carries those problems in its own structure as a novel, given that essentially K.’s pilgrimage does not involve changing places, but going from one exegesis to another, from one commentator to another, listening to each one of them with avid interest and then participating and arguing with everybody, following a method of thorough examination.
As Justo Navarro told me one day, The Castle is the torment of an unending commentary. I think of this statement and tell myself that no doubt it is also the journey of someone searching for the first word, the original word, the source of all writing.
“I know, there need to be two of us.”
“But why two? Why two words to say the same thing?”
“Because it’s always the other who says it.”
I wish to free myself from Montano’s malady, but hopefully the gods and Kafka won’t let me. I wish to free myself from the malady, and that is why I write obsessively about it. However, I know that, were I to achieve this, I could not comment on my achievement, I could not write about it, because, if I did, this would show — since, directly or indirectly, I would have to name the malady to say that I had forgotten it — that I was still thinking about it in some way. This would obviously be as bad as having the malady itself and would end up giving me the impression that my progress toward death and my progress toward the word were one and the same. I wish to free myself from Montano’s malady, but, should this diary ever reach its final hour and I overcome the illness and my salvation be a possibility, I’m not at all sure that it really will be, I think it will be something I need to comment on. This confirms my suspicion that these pages could go on forever; I don’t know if it is desirable either that they do so or that they come to an end. This is how things stand and, living as much with dread of this diary’s infinite movement as with fear of its death, one calms down on this spring night and even rejoices to see that, although one is writing obsessively about it, one is fortunately still Montano-stricken.
MANSFIELD, KATHERINE (Wellington, 1888–Fontainebleau, 1923). We had left the vampiric Tongoy in Valparaiso welcoming me to the Brighton’s terrace; we had left him there after that strange exchange of greetings by ear, which was the start of our friendship. Hours later, that night of the end of the year and the century, endless drinking bout, joyful explosions. At midday on January 1, I again saw Tongoy on the Brighton’s terrace. “How odd he is,” said Rosa. We went toward where he was seated in a corner of the terrace, looking like he had an almighty hangover. It wouldn’t be long now before our man seriously martyred a fly.
We were making friendly remarks about the awful hangover face or mask he was wearing when he suddenly noticed that a fly had fallen into his dry martini and was trying weakly, but desperately, to climb out again. He gave us a frightful look and smiled, baring his fangs in all their splendor. After that he took a teaspoon and elegantly removed the fly from the glass and plopped it on to a paper napkin. A delicate gesture from the monster. The fly soon began to shake its front legs and, raising its tiny, soaked body, it undertook the heroic and moving task of cleaning the dry martini from its wings. Little by little, the fly began to recover and return to life. Tongoy did not stop looking at it. “It’s your good deed for the day,” Rosa said to him. Then Tongoy saw that the fly was about to take off again and he seemed not to like this. Using the teaspoon, he soaked it again in his dry martini. Three times he did this, until he killed it. “It was brave,” he said to us, “but I’m hungover and I’m not in the mood to spare anyone’s life.”
If he wanted to impress us, he had managed to do so, not a lot, but to a degree he had managed it. We remained in silence for a while. I don’t know what Rosa was thinking, I was thinking about Marguerite Duras. I was telling myself that, should Tongoy happen to remark that the fly had died at twenty minutes past twelve, he would be repeating some inspired words by Marguerite Duras, who, in a passage from her book Ecrire, explains how she was moved by a fly’s death throes in her garden at Neauphle-le-Château and how the exact time at which the fly had left this world had engraved itself upon her memory.
But Tongoy was not Marguerite Duras. If I had to compare him to a female writer, I would say he had something in common with Katherine Mansfield, Chekhovian storyteller and angst-ridden diarist, author of a story, “The Fly,” in which, with her customary poetic attention to detail and what is fleeting — with the same inspired melancholy that enabled Proust, for example, to describe the glimmer of twilight above the trees in the Bois de Boulogne — she recounted the forays into the dominions of death and return to life again and again of a fly trapped — a kind of literary illness — in a blot of ink.
I don’t think I shall be far off the mark if I say that the fly was Katherine Mansfield herself, who spent half her life fighting against consumption, fighting against death: “The clocks are striking ten […]. I have consumption. There is still a great deal of moisture (and pain) in my BAD lung. But I do not care. I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books …”