The overcast sky of this night of St. Sylvester in Paris prevents your seeing any refulgence. Quasars, the universe’s wandering energy sources, are born of and converted into potential matter by the collision of galaxies and antigalaxies; antimatter awaiting the extinction of something it can replace. If this is true, a whole world identical to ours — insofar as it is capable of integrally replacing, to the maximum and minimum detail, our world — awaits our deaths to occupy our places. Antimatter is the double or specter of all matter: that is, the double or specter of everything that is.
You smile. Science fiction always based its plots upon one premise: other, inhabited worlds exist, superior in force and wisdom to our own. They keep close watch over us. They threaten in silence. Someday we will be invaded by Martians. Wells/Welles: Herbert George and George Orson. But you believe you are witnessing a different phenomenon: the invaders have not arrived from another place, but from another time. The antimatter that has filled the vacuum of your present gestated, awaiting its moment, in the past. Martians and Venusians have not invaded us, rather heretics and monks from the fifteenth century, conquistadors and painters from the sixteenth century, poets and entrepreneurs from the seventeenth century, philosophers and revolutionaries from the eighteenth century, courtesans and social climbers from the nineteenth century: we have been occupied by the past.
Then are you living an epoch that is yours, or are you a specter from another time? Surely that flautist, that monk, and that girl staring at you from the snowy street ask themselves the same question: Have we been transported to a different time, or has a different time invaded our own?
Would you dare think the unthinkable as you stand and hold back the drape with your only hand? Are you looking at a transposition of the historic past into a future that will have no history?
And obsessively, because you are who you are and are from where you are, you tell yourself that if this is true, the transposition must surely be that of the least realized, the most abortive, the most latent and desiring of all histories: that of Spain and Spanish America. Then you mock yourself with a grimace of secret scorn. Would an Indonesian not say the same, a Burmese, a Mauritanian, a Palestinian, an Irishman, a Persian? Idiot: you have been thinking like a white-wigged Encyclopedist. How can one be a Persian? How, in truth, is it possible to be a Mexican, a Chilean, an Argentinian, or a Peruvian?
And you. What will they do with you? This is the first day — you suddenly realize — they have not brought your single meal. They are going to let you die from hunger. Perhaps they do not know you are there in your suite in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. It isn’t important. The logic of extermination is imposed independently of your existence. Undoubtedly, they have killed your servant. Would it serve any purpose to speed matters up, to go down to the street, join the three beings staring toward your window? It’s all the same. Whoever the true executioners may be, these, others, you will die, ignored, no one will bring you food. You must sleep and recognize your death in dream. You wonder whether you are the only one to perish this way, like the ancient Cathari; you smile. And in that very instant you cease to believe that you are you: this is happening to someone else. Not to just anyone else. To Another. The Other.
You are overwhelmed by vertigo. In that instant, like St. Paul to the Corinthians, you would shout: “I speak as a fool. I am more.”
You return to yourself. You return to your wretched body, your blood, your guts, your feelings, your amputated arm: with your sound arm you cling to yourself as your only life preserver. You are you. You are in Paris, the night of the thirty-first of December of 1999. You passed a day before the monument to Jacques Monod, near Rodin’s statue of Balzac in the Boulevard Raspail. Chance, captured by invariability, becomes necessity. But chance alone, and only chance, is the source of all novelty, of all creation. Pure chance, absolute but blind freedom, is the very foundation of the prodigious edifice of evolution. Without the intervention of this creative chance, every thing and every being would be petrified, preserved like peaches in a can.
Withdrawing your only hand, you allow the curtain to fall closed. You will never again see those three survivors. The silence of the city beneath the snow tells you everything. Everyone is dead. The order of the factors does not alter the product. The men arrived from the past have died, the women of the present impregnated by them, and the children destined for the future, the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine: all Caesars, all Christs, then none a Caesar, none a Christ. Reason? Madness? Irony? Chance? Antimatter? The rules of the game have been fulfilled: every day as many died as were born. The flautist, the monk, and the girl, being the survivors, are necessarily the executioners. Now they will ascend to kill you, and then they will kill themselves.
You go to your bedroom. Lie down, dream, die. Then you hear the sound of knuckles rapping on your door.
They have come for you.
You did not have to descend to seek them.
You did not have to die dreaming.
You open the door.
The girl with the porcelain skin, the long chestnut hair, the full multicolored skirts and gypsy necklaces is looking at you with deep, gray eyes. “‘I have sung women in three cities, but it is all one.’” Women? Cities? “‘They mostly had gray eyes; I will sing of the sun.’” She stares at you, seemingly forever. Then the tattooed lips move, as many-colored as the necklaces and skirts: “Salve. I have awaited you.”
Bedazzled heart.
“Yes.”
You disguise your amazement.
“We had a rendezvous, do you remember? Last fourteenth of July, on the bridge.”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Pollo Phoibus.”
“‘I will sing of the sun,’” you say, not knowing what you say.
“The words written upon your breastplate gleamed, faded, and others appeared in their place…”
“‘Nothing disabuses me; the world has me bewitched,’” you say as if another spoke for you.
“You fell from the Pont des Arts into the boiling waters of the Seine.”
“‘Time is the relationship between the existent and the non-existent.’”
“For a moment I saw your only hand above the water.”
“‘And what if suddenly we all turned into someone else?’”
“I threw the sealed green bottle into the river, praying you would cling to it and be saved.”
“‘Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.’”
“May I come in, then?”
You shake your head. You emerge from your trance. “Forgive me … Excuse … my lack of courtesy … When one is alone one forgets … one forgets … the rules of conduct. Forgive me; come in, please. You are welcome.”
The girl enters the darkness of the apartment.
She takes your hand. Hers is icy. She leads you gently through the living room. In the darkness you cannot see what she is doing. You hear only the swish of her skirts and the chink of the beads of her necklace upon her breasts.
“Bocanegra’s collar … Fray Toribio’s ustorious mirror. All the mirrors … Fray Julián’s triangular mirror that Felipe was unable to destroy when the painter removed the painting from Orvieto … The round mirror Felipe held as he ascended the thirty-three steps in his chapel … The black blood-streaked mirror in which La Señora and Juan looked at themselves one night … The small hand mirror you stole in Galicia before embarking with Pedro to discover new lands … the same mirror in which the ancient of the basket of pearls saw himself … the same mirror in which you looked upon me, crowned with butterflies…”