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SLEEP
“My problem, my central problem, is I can’t sleep. . .” By turns comic and poignant, brutal and beautiful, Sleep follows an insomniac’s long journey to the light through a night of tormenting memories and lucid drunken speculation. A sequence of bizarre encounters with other lonely and despicable denizens of the night leads him to recover some meaning to his life: release from his dead mother’s incapacity for love, his yearning for ‘the first whore’, for ‘the unknown house’, for sleep. . . Michele Spina was born in Messina (Sicily) in 1923. Writer, thinker and teacher, a man of vivid and inspiring intellect he lived almost thirty years in England, in willing exile from his loved and hated Italy (Brobdingnag or the Land of the Houyhnhnms’). His first book to appear in English was West of the Moon (Peter Owen, 1994) Night and Other Short Stories (Colin Smythe) appeared in 1998. Sleep, his finest and most personal work, was completed in London in 1990, shortly before his death. ISBN 0-86140-437-8 Summer 2001 £12.99 For those who would like to read a sample of this novel, here is the first chapter Chapter 1 The bare walls, the mild temperature, the silence and within the silence the distant hum of the office machines, the light and the day slowly slipping towards sunset, all his surroundings, ceaselessly considered and reconsidered, appeared to provide the ideal conditions for sleep. But aside from the fact that he suffered from incurable insomnia, an office is no place for a sleep, no matter how modern. To distract himself, he crossed to the window and stood there looking out onto an internal courtyard, so empty and still that as the hours of the day went by abandon and solitude seemed to mount its walls like liquid shadow, although in reality not a shadow stirred beneath the unvarying glow of the sky. There was wind in the sky and the sun shone brilliantly somewhere; not above the courtyard but over some other district of the city or even some other place faraway, eccentric and probably tropical. The courtyard, small but ostentatiously elegant, was paved in the same pale grey stone as its walls. Each wall of the two lower stories had four windows set within ornate semi-columns crowned by arches, while those of the third and uppermost storey above the arches had only three square windows surrounded by plain mouldings. The effect was completed by a heavy cornice which like a frame around a picture now contained the blue of the windswept sky, looking so detached from all worldly concerns as to suggest a profound vocation for sleep. The more he thought about it, every single thing, every instant, appeared to present an invitation to sleep. The physical presence of the window, the sky beyond the window, the calm light not only in the office but surrounding objects he didn’t see (but whose names arose in his mind moment by moment with the simplicity of picture-book images: rose, vase, gull, tree, or others that kept arriving along the thread of interminable associations) seemed to him to have the immediacy of sleep. The present, he said to himself, anything present or just the simple presence of the present is a prelude to sleep: from the here and now one slips so easily into a sound sleep … or rather one should. Not in his case. What hindered him from crossing the threshold between the present and sleep was, he believed, a certain befuddlement of his thought-process: a confusion and mental tangle in which not only the threads of logic got lost but even those of the imagination. Just as he was dropping off he would suddenly find himself right up against a skein of the unthinkable. Quid tum? he would wonder and wake with a jump. But up to that moment everything would seem to be going so well: he proceeded as it were by salient points, swaying like a reed in the wind from one picture to another, now towards a gloomy dinner with many places set for guests, next towards a winter solstice luminous and somewhat chilly, as though the blankets had slipped from the bed. What all these introductions to sleep had in common was the raw presence of the present or, to avoid tautology, better to say the presence of life as an inevitable but presumably happy necessity, no matter in what direction his destiny might lurch. But I’ve said this or something very like it many times before. What else can I say? he wondered. I repeat myself, he grumbled. And yet, he added, hoping to console himself, there is always some slight variation when one says the same thing. Non nova sed noviter. On the other hand it was precisely the appearance of these variations that disconcerted him; they presented themselves first as innocuous amendments, and the moment they were accepted they turned into eccentric mistakes and irremediable travesties. Maybe it’s the office, he told himself, the tedium of spending so much time sitting down. He shook off his torpor by thinking of the wind which had been strong since this morning, the wind over the sea which must be whipped to a storm by now, unleashing towering waves against the high railway embankment behind which huddled low warehouses and little workshops and miserable flimsy houses whose pale walls seemed to be stubbornly waiting for some benign event to relieve the general gloom of the situation, perhaps even releasing that special elation and high spirits that are reputedly the peculiar attribute of the poor. There were mostly brothels in that street and one in particular he could have described from memory, accurate in every detail. More than just good memory, he felt this descriptive accuracy came from a minute accumulation of forlorn affections, of passions as chill as childhood winters: something damp and windblown, something as solitary and fleeting as an ailing dog; a sight as desolate as Sunday viewed from a brothel door. Perhaps it was not so much a case of an actual doorway, more a mental contrast and comparison between the rainy light in the street and the lukewarm light in the brothel where the pinks, without ever being in great abundance, seemed to him the best of all things he had ever been vouchsafed to see. In any case, the brothel was not truly welcoming, for also inside there and even while the storm was raging they found ways of saying disagreeable things: for example, that his chin hid not only his neck but also his handsome new tie. In the light of the interior two young whores wearing low-cut pink dresses revealing the livid skin over their ribs were chattering idly, at times intertwining their arms in various ways. Even when straining his ears to catch what the two were saying he could still at moments hear the pounding of the sea beyond the railway yard. That pounding even merged with the conversation punctuating statements such as ‘she’s tired’; and words like ‘bum’ ‘lawyer’ ‘coat’ which floated idly while the palest and loneliest of the women wandered from one group to another looking lost. Always, at the end of these or similar intimacies, the sudden booming of the sea brutally injected the presence of time: the physical reality of the instant, but now alert and all-seeing: the grey face of destiny with no concessions to pink, although, thinking back on it with the memories filtering through the lashes of pressing sleep, at least some touch of pink had always appeared somewhere, on the knobby tops of skinny buttocks, for instance. In any case now, no matter how hard he thought about sleep he still wasn’t sleeping; and so the only present whose presence, or burden, he could feel was an ever-waking present, extended to everyone everywhere on earth. At the centre of this immense space, even his office, protective and modern and restful as it might look to him, was no more than one aspect of the vacuous objective vastness, the face of an alien universe staring back at him: effigy of shipwreck and oblivion, not rest. Because, the more he thought about it, what else could be expected of this deserted emptiness, this boundless Libya of time, if not the levelling of the day? What was there to expect from this day now or other days as stagnant as this, in which the mild temperature, the silence or hum of the office machines, the light and the slow slipping of that light towards sunset could contain no other variant but the hope of sleep? ‘No, no!’ he said aloud, waving his hand about as though to fend off evil. ‘Let’s try to get some sleep instead!’ After all, what can be more simple than sleeping? Try! Take an example at random: some character, anyone at all, weary from his labours let’s say, or dazed by too much wine and also exhausted by the heat (in this instance it’s summertime, when sleep comes more easily) staggers over to a huge bed and flops out on it, weight on his left arm, cheek pressing into the pillow, mouth slightly open. And he sleeps; he is already fast asleep. Before his eyes, supposing that he forgot to close them, he can see an open balcony window. The evening breeze stirs the curtains which are not quite fully drawn and through the fluttering gap from time to time he can also see a roof quite far off and the summer sky over the town stretching northwards to the mountains. There’s no more to say. Sleep, when it happens, is one of the simplest events imaginable. He made a gesture of reproach. ‘What silliness!’ he said. Sleep may be called simple, but not everything simple in life can be made to correspond with sleep. Times when one has to stay up all night, for instance, even when purely a matter of form: vigils for the dead, these are simple enough or at least require a few words, for there’s nothing you can say about someone dead apart from, ‘He died, not me: he’s the one who won’t wake again!’ The second half of this proposition, apparently so contradictory, is as much as to say: He is the one who’ll never sleep again, not me, thereby nourishing the hope, no, the expectation of sleep to come. He turned his back on the window: Bah! he said to himself, you don’t have to be very smart to say such silly things and yet these simple interludes of desultory and facile thoughts are also called the dead hours. And these dead hours, he went on, are not only the hours of funeral wakes, but in general all hours of waiting, no matter what one is waiting for, even if it’s nothing. In such cases it must be conceded that perhaps there is not such a great difference between waking and sleeping, but doubtless given the choice it’s better to sleep stretched out in a good bed than waiting on a street corner with eyes wide open, as like as not in the rain. ‘I repeat myself!’ he grumbled. He realised that he was circling a confused memory, a blend of waking and sleeping: it is a silly memory, he told himself, a welter of problems and obscurities. Broadly speaking, he would describe it as a tortuous recollection of something like a general idea, always with different details, and each time incomplete: a print of a moonlit landscape depicting some unattainable mountainous place, a lamp, a half-open window. The right-hand side of each of these images seemed to be almost wholly obliterated, but even after long and hard scrutiny of the parts where something was legible he could never reach a conclusion, as though halted by a blank white stupor expanding over an inconceivable length of time. ‘What are you waiting for?’ they used to shout. ‘Get lost, you’re in the way!’ and meekly he’d stand aside. He was not waiting, he was procrastinating, he would say to himself then, making distinctions like a clever child. In fact, whether he was hanging about or waiting, he wandered endlessly all over the house from the attics to the cellars, particularly in wintertime, silently or at most humming softly, so as to appear to be amusing himself. Or else, to keep up the pretence, he would steal off into the grey light of the cold rooms left to their long winter lethargy. He was hunting for sleep, he whispered as though the quest were somehow a perilous adventure through murky rooms full of shrouded mirrors and sofas and chairs cloaked in dusty sheets. Warily he would push through door after door toward the place where he would at last be able to sleep undisturbed, until bothered by so many creaky door hinges he gave up on his goal which almost out of spite grew more uncertain and futile each time he tried. By the light filtering through slats in the barred shutters over a double window he could make out a black and white moonlight landscape on one wall, which looked desolate, Japanese. Below it glowed the dull yellowish reflections of a brass lamp standing on a marble-topped chest; and glancing into the corner to his left he saw that the sheet covering a wicker chair had slipped to the floor to reveal, in the graceful curve of its arms and the placid sheen of faded silk, how easy it is to rest. But then suddenly, alongside and inseparable from his perception of rest, as similar to rest as a synonym, he felt time slipping by, and the dead hour and so much, so very much silence already wasted. How would this waste ever end? he had wondered, while the grey scowling winter closed around him to prevent any escape. He looked about him: even in this office now, had there been a comfortable and inviting armchair he might still have been tempted by the notion of rest, due to an ambiguity that at first sight made the ideas of rest and sleep appear complementary. Ambiguity, he now believed, is based on a process of approxi-mation. Start by resting, you urge yourself, and the more you rest the nearer you get to an inertia as deep as sleep. In other words, you wait for sleep and meantime you struggle to be content with waiting, as though it were the very thing awaited. In this state of enforced indolence, a fatuous play of thoughts inevitably arises, vague resemblances between the most unlikely places start to occur, but in order to tolerate them you are forced to ignore differences and gloss over distinctions, set aside all verification, examination, evaluation – all analytic reasoning and thinking entirely. Without a thought in your head you lean back in your chair: through the half-open window you can make out a strip of countryside on the verge of summer with a few trees dotted about, silent and motionless. It’s morning still: a morning without a lot of light, and a bit chilly despite the season. ‘Relax!’ you tell yourself. You look through the window with rigid gaze and in return everything you see seems to endorse your immobility. Nothing begins and nothing ends, and even if hour after hour every bell-tower marks the passing of time and possibly also the arrival of the future, this future meekly aligns itself with the present. In short, while awaiting sleep immobility prevails: a dense immobility stratified in numberless hours, bell-towers, future, and suchlike sound and fury. Perhaps rather than talking of present and future as different times, in this case it would be worth thinking of them as a process of oscillation, with everything now coming and now going, without really moving much. All that matters is the variation in proximity not only between the future and sleep but no end of other things, revealing likenesses between all of them which may indeed be provisional: at times futile and ridiculous, but at other times risky and wild as tigers at night. All in all, when we are asleep it is the similarities more than the differences between things that counts: in fact while sleeping we attend not to things but the similarities between things, or more generally the oscillations above and beyond the differences. When all is said and done, this last proposition might be a neat definition for sleep – but having thus defined sleep approximately and in theory, how does one actually get to sleep? Maybe if I keep trying, perhaps resting my head on the desk, he pondered. He sat down, piled some paper up under one elbow and placed his head on top. Just for a start, he thought, I could begin with a proposition about this so-called oscillation or, better, swing. ‘With a chin that sticks out like that,’ his father said to his uncle, putting his gun in the gunrack, ‘what kind of future can he have?’ He shoved the two dogs out of the hall: ‘Shoo, both of you,’ he said with a scowl. ‘They call him Chalky Chin, did you know that? Well, then let him do what he wants,’ he went on, setting his cartridge belt down. Let him read Latin and even Greek if he likes … Of course, he conceded after a short interval of unintelligible grumbles, you are right. I’ll see he’s taken to some whore. At least he’ll learn how to use his prick.’ His first idea of the future came to him after this conversation as he squatted in the fork of the beech tree watching his father and his uncle through the open window. Obviously what the two were talking about was a future as minuscule and transient as the copper-coloured leaf before his eyes, but no less elegant. The whore they spoke of, for example, wasn’t she perhaps futile and short-lived by definition? And yet, how seductive! Ah, the whore! he thought, seeing the foliage flutter in the breeze in the surrounding countryside. Whore, my little whorelet! he repeated to himself, almost singing out loud. The wind grew stronger and the air filled with yellow leaves in flight, a joyous promise of the coming autumn. Everything promised a future close at hand: the sky empty of clouds was a presage of fresher winds and, almost part of this clarity and freshness, promised the whore to come with her soft gold and rosy skin. In these images or portents future and present resembled each other, interwoven like strands of moonlight on a prophetic night. Oro y amor en la encendida noche … And at that point he had dropped off to sleep and had fallen out of the tree with such a thud the dogs still running loose in the garden had rushed up to him. And now, he said, raising his head from the reclining position which apart from anything else was rather uncomfortable, now fantasising about whores wouldn’t put me to sleep even if I climbed to the top of a pine tree. The trouble was, he thought, that the future had become irrelevant for him, locked within a time that was not so much different from him as irremediably other than himself: a neutral time conventionally numbered. Is this the future? he had in fact asked himself when signing a lease for a store he owned in town and chanced to think of the years to come. His indifference to this future had nothing to do with the usual considerations about the futility or brevity of life or the dread of imminent death because being in good health for a man of thirty-five, he didn’t see his own death as a likely occurrence. Strangely, though, while signing away what could be called a chunk of his own future in front of witnesses, he had felt this contractual future was a symptom of an extraneous eternity: image of oblivion, not of existence. But then where would the existence of the future be sought? During his sleepless nights he had often struggled to seek out some prophecy or other sort of premonition, scanning the sky as the most probable location for portents, hunting for a signal that might betray the hidden and mysterious presence of things to come. It was not the mystery itself that he sought to unveil: he merely wanted to reassure or console his heart, and so sometimes even in the cold of autumn nights out on the open balcony for a better view, there was not a moonbeam gleaming on the rooftops or in the windows of the houses opposite, no branch stirring or other tiny detail however fleeting that he left unscrutinised. Every sudden downpour occasioned a persistent investigation of the future almost between one drop and the next. But no eventual future was ever in the signs. I could get a chicken or
rabbit gutted and inspect the intestines, he had thought once. So he went to an
old woman He grimaced with
irritation. Forget it, he told himself. After all, the future, as it’s commonly
understood, is a preoccupation only for old witches. But what about the past?
Did the past combine better with sleep, at least in the form of memories That’s how it goes! he
said ruefully, shaking his head. More wisely now he restricted himself, at least
in memory, to bidding the most restrained of farewells to the tree and his own
dazzling future as an apple farmer. In fact the memory he now retained was
indeed of the future, but in the sense of a future on the And so the hunt for
sleep continued, trailing a residue of frustrated somnolence: the memory of the
past and that of the future (which in any case appeared explicitly only once,
and, so to speak in editio princeps, in the apple tree) remained
confined not so much to the world of memory as to the precious world He stood up and started to pace up and down the room. ‘Words!’ he exclaimed, shaking his head and striking a pose midway between irony and disgust as best he could. ‘Words!’ he repeated to himself several times in the same tone. But every time he had to admit that these words had never let him down, and that actually he had used and abused them, riding on them towards his own caprices or sometimes following the caprices of the words, leaping in all directions by means of alliteration, metonymy and all the figures of speech that came into his head, sailing over a great swamp of silence. Without the buoyancy of words, unsteady and precarious as it was, that black swamp would have clasped him in its softness and he would have ended up completely, desperately alone. But then the clouds, the colours of the sky, the trees and leaves, the sand on the beaches, the rocks on the trails, the wheatfields, the crests of the hills in the distance… what would have become of all this? ‘Ridiculous!’ he said, shrugging his shoulders, There is no complaint a good sleep can’t cure. Every problem for him was nothing but insomnia, but, as the doctors said, he was in excellent health and at some time or another he too would get a chance to sleep. In the meantime he cherished every detail of this future sleep with tireless imagination: the bed, the way the pillows were arranged, the light, the room temperature. Somewhere, he fancied, there was a room ideal for sleep: a place not necessarily very large, but silent and above all enclosed, walled on all sides so that the boredom and the clamour of the world could not intrude. Something modest which he could improve by buying a few things, perhaps even the broom cupboard or storeroom down the hallway from his office, for example, which he had once entered by mistake and which, revisited in his imagination, he thought he could easily equip for his purposes almost luxuriously, with at least a handsome deep armchair, if not a sofa, in addition to the bed. In any case the luxury was imprecise and the light dim: and yet the possibility of sleep in a such an odd place appeared more likely than in all the other rooms available to him, each being already tainted, so to speak, by an attempt to sleep and the consequent failure. All the same, mulling
over this eventual sleep and what practical steps he might take to gain it, he
sometimes lost It might not be full
sleep, but he felt he had attained a plausible imitation of it: it was roughly a
not-feeling and yet recognising, a forgetting and yet remembering, and a
knowledge mingled with ignorance. With such vague sophisms he alluded to a
sleepless sleep similar to sailing on calm but unknown seas. There was the
superb allure of an ocean-going vessel, but the grey of the calm sea gripped his
heart; this oppressive calm, real though it was, often felt to him so laboured
that his mind preferred to escape; and in an interminable dusk, swift as a rat,
his memory scaled the steep ruins of his past constructions: words tumbled down
from their ancient fixed positions creating a deliberately extravagant chatter.
For example, seated on his bed, a wild crone looking like an aged dying aunt
told tales about systems of priorities. According to her every unity was
anchored to its own system of priorities which were not only moral but included
grammar, syntax, even visual perception itself. Without this system, she
maintained, nothing would manage to stand out from the common background; and it
He returned to his desk slowly and composed himself in a dignified manner. ‘So which is better,’ he repeated, ‘shit or piss?’ As a matter of fact he had never contemplated judgements of such vast consequence because he lived his daily life amidst opinions and passions, concerning himself with the immediate and the transitory, while solemn decisions about what was better or worse for the country required a robust conscience and consequently absolute faith in one’s own arguments: a faith uncluttered by passing emotions. And if his own life as he had lived it could be called deprived or at least poor in emotional content, this poverty was not the result of choice but of chance. In other words, he had never abstracted his own individual will from existence in general and therefore it would have been inappropriate or even irreverent to contemplate the destiny of the country so to speak on equal terms, shitty or pissy as it might be. ‘Forget it!’ he resolved, striking the desk with his fist and making the papers shake. But if he could not sleep or live sleeping as he stubbornly tried to do, in the absence of great choices or grand subjects or themes, what was to be done with his consciousness? Where could he place his own undeniable awareness of living? ‘Let’s imagine…’ he said to himself, leaning back in his chair. ‘Let’s just relax and imagine, for example, that one winter night a traveller arrives in some unknown town intending to stay there: let’s say it’s this very town with its ephemeral inhabitants, provisional and interchangeable: men and whores who meet only once because even if they were to meet again they wouldn’t recognise each other, or even the town, strangers by definition. Town and inhabitants and houses and streets, therefore, of an unawareness so exemplary as to merit inclusion in the sophistic lists: a sad grey ignorance with no escape, for which living could only be resignation. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine this sadness in a way both practical and even wise, like the pursuit of humble virtues and the satisfaction of faded pleasures: a tree-lined street in summer, a flat not too spacious, a not unattractive woman. In thrall to this fantasy of a minimal life, behind his eyelids he conjured light and dark, reflections and colours: all those elements of sight which bring life to even the haziest images without being anything in themselves: a woman never seen, an unknown street, a house never lived in. Evanescent phantoms of which the house was possibly the most enduring: empty of people perhaps, but at least furnished with beds and chairs and tables: the solitude of things under the tireless surveillance of polished mirrors. But how long could he live in this house of fantasy, opening and closing unknown doors, watching the rustle of the trees outside the panes in non-existent windows? He glanced at his watch: time seemed to trickle by with implacable slowness, the hours just didn’t manage to fill up with all the minutes and seconds assigned to them, except with the greatest effort. Time seemed to advance undecided, at times even seemed tempted to go into reverse. ‘Away!’ he exhorted himself. ‘The answer is to get far away.’ That is, he urged himself to flee the obsessive slowness of local time, to head for a sky with swifter clouds, a light more quick to be born and die. Because here instead the light showed no sign of wanting to leave the summit of the sky. Perhaps, as sometimes happens at sunset, the sky was immobilised in long strips of tranquil clouds behind which the sun stagnated or perhaps, under cover of these long shadows, was now mounting the sky again to go back over its previous journey. He stopped, closing his eyes with a smile midway between disdain and self-pity. At times he was so indignant with himself that he would have gladly beaten himself with a club. Instead he limited himself to a few clouts, not hitting himself, which would be silly as well as difficult, but surprising the first person he saw and whacking him over the ears, making a great deal of noise but causing little harm, he trusted. In any case the hullabaloo that followed calmed him and reduced his self-indignation to a milder inward laugh. Certainly there was no generosity or even elegance in these practical jokes played on his unsuspecting fellow man; but who would ever maintain that a game has to be either magnanimous or elegant? Also this assault on a fellow human being gave him, at least fleetingly, the consolation of not being alone. The other person in other words, wasn’t only his neighbour because of the generic similarity, but was almost himself by proxy, standing in to receive the clout intended for himself. So, for the duration of a minute or two this kinship cancelled his solitude, and along with the solitude, the grouchiness that typifies solitary people. Moreover, perhaps some of his blows were delivered not only out of rage at himself but also because at times after a particularly resounding thump over the back of a head he could sense his victim’s heart swelling with a confused but violent desire for war. The hope, that is, if not for machine-guns firing in the main square, at least a few gunshots in the streets, which would undeniably have made life in the land more interesting, and certainly more dignified. The door which at that moment he happened to be watching began to open silently and imperceptibly. When it had reached a sufficient width, this silent opening produced in no time as if by magic a complete woman, five foot seven inches tall, nimble and light, who appeared to be more old than young, that is his secretary in person. ‘Good for you!’ he laughed. ‘Is that the way you appear before me when I’m least expecting you?’ She lowered her eyes with a deliberately childish show of vexation: ‘I can’t always do it,’ she murmured, and closing the door behind her moved towards him with an air of conspiracy. From under raised eyebrows she inspected him with wide-open enormous eyes, slow and glowing like those of a beast in the dark, while her mouth, which was naturally large with generous lips, pouted to suggest secrecy in a way that was explicitly charged and clownish. In any case, as every afternoon, her entrance signalled for him a sudden passage from a situation which was, so to speak, silent if not quiet to another which was agitated and noisy, even if more full of whispers than sounds. On second thoughts, the passage or rather leap was in language, that is from the silence of a language that was strictly only thinkable to the noise or rather verbalism of the language in everyday usage: that in which a single word, for example ‘crap’, variously conjugated (take, talk, eat) designates the entire range of interpersonal relationships possible in the country. Without hesitation therefore he exclaimed: ‘Do me a favour! Go and get stuffed!’ while not concealing his affection for the woman; in fact smiling at her. ‘I already have!’ she reassured him, this time with a cordial urgency. ‘Now you please do me a favour!’ she went on, lowering her voice. ‘Don’t smile. It’s alarming to see a smile on a face like yours. I’m always afraid that all that weight could make the lower part of your face drop off.’ They both laughed mildly. ‘Oh, yes,’ he resumed. ‘You can joke … As if I had time to waste on your silliness. I have problems of my own, I have!’ She nodded several times, encouragingly. ‘Hmm,’ he continued. ‘My main problem, my true problem is that I can’t ever get to sleep.’ She took hold of a chair on the other side of the desk and sat down: ‘Would you like me to tell you a dream?’ she proposed. ‘Yes, do sit down, do sit down,’ he invited her. ‘Let’s see. What dream do you want to tell me this time?’ ‘An easy one,’ she said, and her face brightened. ‘So easy in fact that even you could have it.’ She paused, looking up from under her eyelashes. ‘Let’s try this,’ she went on. ‘Word went round that the sun was entirely covered with little crosses and the old women swore that this was a bad omen.’ ‘What sun? What old women? What little crosses? What sort of story is this?’ he asked, laughing. ‘It’s a story within a
dream,’ she explained patiently, tracing the edge of the desk with her fingers
spread. ‘Now I say “sun” but in the dream this word refers to nothing, merely
indicates a possibility. What’s more, all the words of the dream are words for
show: one says “sun” and sees the sun with bare eyes, or actually one sees it as
a painted disk rather than a blinding light. In other words in the dream the sun
has a moderate bright- ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m interested.’ ‘Well now,’ she went on, ‘a great fog rolled in and in a corner of this fog, near the bell tower, an old woman was wailing and shaking her head: “How badly I’ve been fucked! All my life they fucked me badly.” “How did that happen?” I asked “Who fucked you so badly?” ‘And she: “All those fat-cats: they overeat and that brings on a bestial lust, because, as St. Jerome said venter et genitalia sunt sibi propinqua ut ex vicinitate membrorum colligatur confoederatio vitiorum. Or as it is put more simply in the Psalms: Prodit quasi ex adipe iniquitas eorum. Therefore, these fat-cats are always trouble, though often their pricks are limp.”’ ‘That’s certainly true,’ he agreed. ‘This part about the fat-cats I like. But could you please explain it word for word, as you did before?’ ‘Oh, no!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s not possible to tell a dream and at the same time distract oneself with explanations. Every dream is its own interpretation. So if you want me to tell them to you, you must be happy with what I say.’ ‘So be it!’ he accepted. ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘when you tell your dreams you even look pretty.’ She thanked him for the compliment with a nod of her head. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘while the old woman went on bewailing her lot, some shrill and confused voices could be heard in the air above the houses, with no sign of whoever was making these sounds. The fog thickened, wrapping all the daylight in a whiteness so thick you could stroke it, while all around hens and roosters kept clucking and crowing. Convinced that this racket from the poultry yards announced the Last Judgement, a lot of people armed themselves with clubs to hit the authorities over the head and brain them. At this point I hid, that is I took the old woman mal baisée by the arm and we went together looking for a latrine. At least that’s the way it seemed.’ ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go on with the story.’ ‘Ah,’ she laughed, ‘it’s not worth it! And then to go on from here I would lapse into propaganda; there would be no more wonder or surprise, but at best one would be entertained by the spectacle of the dream, because at this point the dream has already declared its theme or at least revealed its thesis, which is politics in this case. There were men armed with clubs and you can well understand their intentions.’ ‘Oh, really,’ he observed with irritation. ‘How can you be so sure?’ She half smiled, but remained silent. ‘It is not the least bit easy,’ he continued. ‘I certainly couldn’t have such a dream. And you, when did you have it? Last night? The night before? Monday?’ ‘There are no dates in dreams. And if there were they would be forgotten, because days are all alike when one is dreaming. And then, even awake, you, for example, do you always know what day of the week it is?’ He made an evasive
gesture and getting up from his desk, went towards the window. Looking into the
courtyard, into the almost liquid shadow it contained, he felt he was gazing at
the image of a previous day, Thursday which was yesterday, or another day before
that, perhaps Monday. All he could say was that this hypothetical Monday was
lying around now in various parts of the courtyard, certainly transparent, but
only just a little bit colder and slightly more opaque than the present day.
Perhaps, he thought, this frail remnant of the past was no more than the ghost
of the stillness of the courtyard, the spectre of the grey stone, of its
thickness and weight in columns arches and cornices: and this stagnating phantom
of architecture, shadow in the shadow, resembled the ghostly illusion or simple
desire He heard the rustle of pages. ‘She’ll be wanting to tidy up’ he thought. Instead, a moment later his secretary started speaking again a bit dreamily about the days of the week. ‘Friday,’ she was saying, ‘what does Friday mean? And Saturday? For me these nouns all evoke images of a swing.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It could be. What’s more,’ he added after a while, ‘dreams in themselves don’t interest me. They simply indicate sleep. That’s all. If I remember a dream I can assume I have been asleep, as when one says: “If she has milk, she has given birth”.’ The comparison pleased him and he started to laugh. She watched him stupefied: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you remind me of one of my classmates? When we were both fourteen years old he was talking about the Stoics which he found amusing, while I was thinking: My God, how young he is!’ He started to laugh again. ‘You,’ he said, ‘were not thinking then: “My God, how young he is!” but rather: “To hell with him, how stupid he is!” otherwise the similarity to me would not have crossed your mind.’ She looked at him for a while without responding. ‘I feel at ease with you,’ she eventually said, ‘as if we were classmates. Despite the socio-economic difference, I am sure the two of us can laugh at the same things, with no disrespect on my side.’ ‘And why should you show respect for me?’ he asked. ‘Never, never do that!’ he pleaded. ‘Besides, it is in the finest tradition to be disrespectful when one speaks of dreams.’ ‘We are not only talking about dreams,’ she retorted. ‘You yourself have already acknowledged that at times I have given you some interesting information.’ He nodded. ‘So,’ she went on, ‘as you already know, this New Finance syndicate that concerned itself with advances on bribes and recycling of anomalous sums, at least officially (that is, for all they tell me) now has extended its activity to life annuities.’ ‘That I know,’ he said crossly. ‘What’s new about that?’ ‘Private,’ she whispered, ‘Private news, this time. It concerns my father. I’ve received a letter of congratulation because my father has supposedly expressed an intention to take out a life annuity.’ ‘Why should New Finance congratulate you,’ he asked, making an effort to show surprise. ‘After all, it is contrary to his personal interest.’ ‘It is a way like any other to warn me,’ she replied. ‘But surely you understand more than you want me to believe! No? And yet you know the man very well. All right, let’s forget about it! What bothers me is that in the last two months, the syndicate has issued about fifty life annuities. Unfortunately not many of the beneficiaries of these policies are still alive today. Some fell from balconies, some slipped and banged their heads on a step. The old pharmacist on the Corso drowned in his bath and the man who sold stamps in via dell’Orso fell from the top of the tower of Porta Vecchia in the middle of the night: at two in the morning, they say. There is more than one reason to be superstitious, wouldn’t you agree?’ ‘What can I say?’ he replied brusquely. ‘Why mix me up in it? That character you are alluding to, I have only seen him twice and only on official occasions. And then I am not in business with anyone. I have never had anything to do with politicians, not me. Everything I own I inherited and I can prove that down to the last penny.’ ‘Of course, of course!’ she assured him. ‘This is also well known. And yet the fact remains that some people in town as rich or even richer than you are now either dead or living in the direst poverty; but you are in good health and still hold onto all your patrimony.’ ‘What is that supposed to imply?’ he demanded, banging his fist on the desk. ‘Come on,’ she laughed, ‘Why take it like that? I merely wanted to say that there is no longer any distinction between money and politics and that by now wherever there is money there must be politics, or as they say: qui tangit picem, inquinabitur ab ea.’ He got up from the desk. ‘Are you an agent provocateur now?’ he asked with affected gentleness. ‘Who told you to come here to disturb me?’ Without waiting for a reply, he turned his back on her and walked away. ‘Silly chatterbox!’ he said as if to himself. ‘Even as a spy she’s not worth much.’ ‘You’re afraid!’ she commented. He turned and reached her almost in one bound. ‘You don’t mean to hit me, do you?’ she asked, standing up so swiftly that the chair toppled over on the carpet. He stopped himself at once: ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I don’t always weigh my words, but have you ever heard anyone say I ever struck a woman?’ ‘No?’ she asked with diffidence, while she righted the chair. They eyed each other for a few moments; then, as if in agreement, both sat down again. ‘Why do you say so many silly things?’ he resumed. ‘Haven’t I always been civil with you, whenever I had occasion?’ She nodded. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I too have always been very afraid. It would be stupid not to admit it: you can read it in my face! At the beginning it wasn’t that way, don’t you remember? We opened the newspapers and read about bribes and graft. We shrugged our shoulders: it wasn’t our money. Then came the kidnapping and extortion. “Just four scoundrels!” we said and still shrugged our shoulders. How long ago? Ten years? Twenty? Twenty years ago I was writing my thesis. I ended up with honours for my academic labours and, when the time came to compete for jobs, I had to admit that the scoundrels were neither four nor forty, but at least forty million! How many fucks in exchange for vague promises! So, screw today, screw tomorrow, I eventually got my job too and so I began screwing my way up. It seems only yesterday doesn’t it? You certainly didn’t have to follow my curriculum. You jumped straight to the top of the hierarchy, five years ago, one fine spring day. Your predecessor had shot himself three times in the head. There were so many suicides at that time. In any case no one was surprised when you arrived. They said you inherited not only his beautiful house on the Corso, the shops under the porticos and who knows what else, but also certain documents deposited in solid foreign safes. “Won’t those documents ever expire?” a lot of people are now asking themselves.’ While she was speaking he shook his head in a manifestly pitying way though she couldn’t see him because she stubbornly kept her gaze fixed on her hands, in fact inspecting them with a frown: ‘Rubbish!’ he finally said, displaying more boredom than anger in his voice. ‘Do I bore you?’ she asked, suddenly looking him straight in the face with her large eyes wide open. He smiled and returned to pitying mode: ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘You are clearly upset, but I don’t understand why you feel such rancour.’ ‘Rancour?’ she protested. ‘Certainly not. Every one knows you are harmless, aside from a few punches. I actually feel sorry for you. When those documents of yours expire what will happen to you? Will you defend yourself with punches?’ ‘So you feel sorry for me?’ he laughed. ‘You really aren’t being very nice to me today.’ ‘All right! I’m out of my mind. Try to forgive me. What do you recommend?’ ‘Hmm,’ he said with evident hesitation. ‘What do I know about your doings?’ He didn’t want to appear to be too rude, however. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘You know what they want. I don’t.’ ‘According to me,’ she said, moving closer to him confidingly, ‘it is a piece of land in the country we have above the road to the lighthouse. About eight acres in all. A conservation zone: no buildings of any sort allowed there, not even a hut, but ‘they’, I am told, have already been granted planning permission for a big hotel. If I let them have it, do you think they will let me keep the flat in town?’ He looked at her for a full minute without responding, but the questioning tension in her face did not diminish. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he finally said. ‘After all a three-room flat in an old building, as you have described it to me, isn’t even worth the cost of a notary in these cases.’ ‘That sounds right,’ she nodded. ‘You’ve made me feel much better. After all, little people like us have always been left more or less in peace. It’s the hotel they’re after. Perhaps I could even squeeze a bit of money out of it. What do you say?’ ‘Why not?’ he encouraged her. ‘Give it a try!’ ‘Can I use your name?’ she asked. ‘You know, just drop it into the conversation. After all I am your secretary.’ ‘I am not a good reference,’ he said. ‘You acknowledged that yourself.’ He stood up and paced the room, waving a hand as though to chase off something bothersome. ‘And then,’ he added, ‘it is not elegant to get mixed up in other people’s affairs.’ He tried to laugh without success. A long silence followed. He went to the window, pretending to study something in the courtyard. ‘And yet,’ he said after a while, ‘if you think my name could be of use…’ ‘I would do it just …’ she excused herself, ‘in a symbolic sense, more to reassure myself than to intimidate or persuade them.’ They both fell silent. ‘In a symbolic sense?’ he asked without looking at her, after more than a minute. ‘I,’ she said, ‘when I
am really afraid I start chattering at random to keep from crying, and also say
things off the top of my head. For instance, I mention names of people who have
nothing to do with it, neither with the facts, nor with me: names of people I
have never fucked. It’s like turning to some saint, I suppose, to tear my eyes
off the shit that terrifies me. Diversionary names, let’s say that I pompously
call symbolic There was a fresh silence. ‘And do the big-bellies have a symbolic function?’ he finally asked, conciliatingly. ‘You mean in my dream?’ she asked in her turn. ‘Did you like it?’ ‘Yes, amusing,’ he admitted. ‘That is, what you have to say about symbols is amusing. And I think the same can be said of dreaming, even of sleep. Perhaps we no longer know how to speak according to the old ways and traditions, instead we dream – at least those of us who can. Rhetoric is finished and now symbols are all the rage: when rhetoric’s day is over, barbarism begins. Don’t you agree? I would prefer simply to sleep.’ ‘Rhetoric!’ she said with sudden warmth. ‘Think of the way good composition was taught twenty years ago. In chorus the teachers used to chant: jubent exordiri…deinde rem narrare… post autem dividere causam…Tum alii conclusionem orationis collocant, alii jubent ante quam peroretur, digredi.’ ‘All right,’ he interrupted her. ‘But look at this courtyard. At certain moments I don’t recognise it.’ He went on watching the
shadow that coated the walls of the courtyard with the oppressive sensation of
never having seen ‘I know what sleep is like,’ he declared. ‘Ah!’ she said, ‘Your mania for sleep!’ ‘What could be better? Sleep is beautiful, restful, and I would even say wholly satisfying. Don’t you think so?’ He moved closer to her, and placing a hand on her shoulder went on to talk about sleep, citing examples from the past as well: sleeps like gardens of shadows without any plot or content describable, like when he was a boy and one afternoon in open country he fell asleep watching the tall poplars full of little leaves ever more luminous, ever more tiny and at the very tips sinking into the depths of the sky. Finally he also cited more recent sleeps, winter ones, half inventing the circumstances. ‘And so,’ he ended, ‘sometimes I too have happened to sleep, naturally almost without being aware of it. What about you?’ She nodded: ‘That’s how it happens, just as you say. Rhetoric is finished.’ She continued, as if trying hard to find the words: ‘Once rhetoric was everywhere. Remember? In songs, speeches, in the first timid approaches between boys and girls. And then the great love, the grand passion, the great challenge of life which we imagined hazily (but with grand words resounding with imperatives) would resolve everything in a grand victory for rhetoric. All gone! There are merely ghosts now in a labyrinth of regrets and we have nothing more to resolve. The weight of all that remains unresolved seems pathetic to us and even breaks our balls. This is the truth! Everything begins from nothing and without warning ends in nothing,’ she said, shaking her head and as if talking to herself. He was silent for a while. ‘Anyhow,’ he said in the end grumpily, ‘you don’t even listen to me. Yet you come asking me for advice or rather to irritate me. Now I’m tempted to think someone sent you to tell me your nonsense. Out of curiosity? For a joke?’ ‘No, no!’ she protested, taking his hand and holding it between hers. ‘Don’t say things like that. On the contrary, I am grateful to you. Don’t you believe me?’ He shrugged his shoulders, placated, trying to extricate his hand without seeming too brusque. He moved away from her chair. ‘Why do we have to quarrel? But it is actually quite amusing’ he said, and started to laugh. ‘It’s the fault of the fat-cats!’ she laughed in turn. ‘As you see, I feel like the old woman in my dream. But truly don’t you also think that things would go better if we had people in power who were not so fat and not such gluttons? These big-bellies bring bad luck, in my opinion.’ ‘Well, well! And how so?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, making a fanning motion with her hand. ‘Among other things I imagine them always surrounded by a dense stink of farts. When I saw you right up close to the character who proposed the life annuity I thought: ‘Won’t he be gassed?’ He made a gesture of irritation. ‘Go ahead and laugh,’ he said. ‘Do you think you are so smart? So intelligent? Do you think you can get away with it, by laughing along with everyone else or am I the only clown for you?’ ‘All right,’ she said, dropping her head. She stood up, but then hesitated, with her hand on the back of the chair. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I must confess I sometimes feel nostalgia for elevated language. Now, for example, if I could unbare my heart I would take flight on wings of poesy to express my thanks. But today with the feet of the big-bellies planted on our hearts, how can we use those lofty expressions that not so long ago we at least heard at the opera? Their great big feet have trampled on our elevated words, the tragic and even the comic. Nevertheless I thank you with tears in my eyes. I even kiss your hand. Would you like a kiss on the hand?’ He shook his head without saying anything and continuing to watch her, sunk into herself now and almost clinging to the chair, weary with the weight of her forty years, while the silence grew, almost to the point of passing from silence into emptiness. Finally he managed to take his eyes off her and look over to the window still benignly filled with afternoon light, while she began to speak again: this time, as was her wont, her tone was at times almost theatrically solemn and yet voluble, but always with transparent traces of her customary mocking humour. ‘I want to tell you another dream,’ she said, ‘not an easy one like the first, but curious. And then, who knows, perhaps you will manage to resolve it in a way different from mine. It involved a fortified structure and a courtyard: something square and dim without being truly dark. In fact there is a lamp somewhere; the light comes at strange angles. Perhaps it’s not that structure; perhaps it is more accurate to say that as I dream I am in the grip of an oppressive feeling: heaviness, a sort of walled-in feeling and I am trying to explore this feeling word by word. I go from one word to another and go blindly, but with some hope of a solution, until this feeling closes in front of me, hemming me in like a blank wall. But this is the point: this hemming in (I think still in the dream) perhaps is not a failure, but actually the solution. What do you think?’ ‘What solution?’ he asked, to be polite. Her chatter no longer interested him. What’s more, he feared her words concealed some trap. She can take good care of herself, after all, he thought bitterly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it is more a hypothesis, or rather a hint of a solution; perhaps it is barely a word, but the last, the one word remaining after all those through which I passed in order to arrive at that wall. If you promise me not to laugh, I will tell you.’ ‘Go ahead, tell me!’ he grumbled. He moved away, turning his back on her and starting to look out of the window again. ‘All right,’ she said to his back, lowering her voice. ‘The word is God. Of course,’ she continued hesitantly, ‘in saying God I realise that the expression sounds incongruous, to say the least. A structure, a wall is God? you will say. But what sort of simile is this? What metaphor? All right, I say. This is a concrete, small God, that’s understood; not the immensity of grace, nothing bigger than a falcon God who can swoop down on the big-bellies and rip them open. But apart from this blasphemous reduction of divinity, in the face turned towards them, in the more ample face, even if this too is reductive, in the wall that I see or rather grope to touch, there is also something solid for me: a wall smooth as jasper, very tall, forming a barrier against malevolent stars. Of course I use the word wall just to name something real, but I believe that the names of actual things, even taken at random, if said of God, always bring a sort of idolatrous peace, a pagan consolation, but so persuasive I could weep.’ ‘But what kind of wall?’ he asked, under his breath. The light seemed to darken by half a tone. A passing cloud, he said to himself; but he felt oppressed: shadows, clouds, lights, whatever they were, all things visible appeared to be heading more intently towards desolation now. ‘How can I put it?’ she laughed. ‘With this bad habit of symbols, today we think we have the power to summon everything into our presence and resolve everything in the midst of our own mess, including God, while actual things taken one by one, the names of realities, at least, are like destiny: unexpected they rear up before our ignorance, and sometimes unexpectedly they can seem to us to be the solution. This is when we are dreaming, of course. Isn’t that why you are searching for dreams?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not searching for dreams. And then what solution are you going on about?’ They were both silent for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but now you should go.’ ‘Should I say that I’ll let them have the land at a good price?’ she asked timidly. ‘Of course,’ he approved. ‘But now go and get stuffed, if you please.’ ‘Right away!’ she whispered. And with a rustle she was gone, leaving the scene empty, he felt, with theatrical suddenness. All the same, the office was and remained, as always, modern and comfortable: the bare walls, the mild temperature, the silence and, in the distance, the hum of typewriters, the light and the day slowly slipping towards sunset evoked the idea of sleep again with renewed dignity. The courtyard too, now distinctly narrow yet grandiose, seemed to be made of the same unalterable and infinite substance as the shadow. A reticent day was retreating: there were columns and arches and paving stones; there was shadow everywhere and in the shadow the serenity that prevailed was that peculiar to farewells and the renunciation of those who know they are sleeping. 05/05/05 |
