A Breath of Life (3 page)

I’ve already read this book through to the end and I’m adding to this beginning something for you to keep in mind. It’s that the end, which shouldn’t be read beforehand, comes back to the beginning in a circle, a snake swallowing its own tail. And, having read the book, I cut much more than half of it, I only left what provokes and inspires me for life: a star lit at dusk.

Do not read what I write as a reader would do. Unless this reader works, he too, on the soliloquies of the irrational dark.

If this book ever comes out, may the profane recoil from it. Since writing is something sacred where no infidel can enter. I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to “like.” But a small group will see that this “liking” is superficial and will enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither “bad” nor “good.”

Inspiration is like a mysterious scent of amber. I have a small piece of amber with me. The scent makes me sister to the sacred orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Blessed be your loves. Could it be that I am afraid to take the step of dying at this very instant? Careful not to die. Yet I am already in the future. This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well. That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

The Daydream Is What Reality Is

ANGELA

The last word will be the fourth dimension.

Length: her speaking

Width: beyond thought

Depth: my speaking of her, of facts and feelings and of her beyond-thought.

I must be legible almost in the dark.

I had a vivid and inexplicable dream: I dreamed I was playing with my reflection. But my reflection wasn’t in a mirror, but reflected somebody else who wasn’t me.

Was it because of this dream that I invented Angela as my reflection? Everything is real but moves lei-sure-ly in slow motion. Or it jumps from one theme to another, disconnected. If I uproot myself I expose my roots to wind and rain. Brittle. And not like blue granite and the stone of Iansã without cracks or fissures. Angela for now has a swathe of fabric over her face that hides her identity.

As she speaks she begins removing this swathe — until her face is naked. Her face speaks unpolished and expressive. Before unmasking her I shall cleanse the air with rain and prepare the soil for plowing.

I will avoid sinking into the whirlpool of her river of liquid gold glimmering with emeralds. Her mud is reddish. Angela is a statue that cries out and flutters around the canopy of the trees. Her world is only as unreal as the life of anyone who happens to read me. I raise high the lantern so she can glimpse the road that is a wrong turn. Stupefied and with uninhibited joy I watch her rise with a ruffling of wings.

To create her I must plow the land. Is there some breakdown in the computer system of my ship while it crosses spaces in search of a woman? a computer made of pure silicon, with the equivalent of thousands of microscopic transistors fixed to its polished and gleaming surface with the noonday sun beating down in a mirror, Angela is a mirror.

I want her to be the means by which the highest axioms of mathematics are solved within a fraction of a second. I want to calculate through her the answer to seven times the square root of 15 to the third power. (The exact figure is 406.663325.)

Angela’s brain is embedded in a protective layer of plastic that makes it practically indestructible — after I die Angela will keep vibrating. A statue always being relocated by the crazed disturbing buzz of three thousand golden bees. An angel carried by blue butterflies? An angel isn’t born and doesn’t die. An angel is a spiritual state. I sculpted her with twisted roots. It’s only out of impudence that Angela exists in me. As for me I reduce everything to a tumult of words.

We are all sentenced to death. While I write I might die. One day I shall die amidst random facts.

— It was God who invented me and gave His breath to me and I became a living being. And so it is that I present to myself a person. And therefore I think that I am sufficiently born to try to express myself even if with rough words. It’s my interior that speaks and sometimes without connection to my conscious mind. I speak as though someone were speaking for me. Perhaps the reader speaks for me?

I do not remember my previous life, since I have the result which is today. But I remember tomorrow.

How shall I begin?

I’m so frightened that the way to enter this writing has to be suddenly, without warning. Writing is without warning. So I start with the instant like someone throwing himself into suicide: the instant is all of a sudden. And so it is that I’ve all of a sudden arrived in the middle of a celebration. I’m flustered and apprehensive: it’s not easy to deal with Angela, the woman I invented because I needed a facsimile of dialogue. An accursed celebration? No, the celebration of a man who wishes to share with you, Angela, something that absorbs me completely.

Angela Pralini is the celebration of birth. I don’t know what to expect from her: will I just have to transcribe her? I must be patient so as not to lose myself within me: I live losing sight of myself. I need patience because I am many paths, including the fatal dead-end alley. I am a man who chose the great silence. Creating a being who stands in opposition to me is within the silence. A spiraling clarinet. A dark cello. But I manage to see, however dimly, Angela standing beside me. Here she is coming a little closer. Then she sits by my side, rests her face in her hands and weeps for having been created. I console her making her understand that I too feel the vast and shapeless melancholy of having been created. I’d rather have stayed in the immanescence of the sacred Nothing. But there is a wisdom of nature that caused me, after being created, to move about even though I didn’t know what my legs were for. Angela, I too made my home in a strange nest and I too obey the obstinacy of life. My life wants me to be a writer and so I write. It’s not by choice: it’s an intimate command.

And just as I received the breath of life that made me a man, I breathe into you who become a soul. I introduce you to myself, visualizing you in snapshots that already happen in the midst of your inauguration: you don’t start at the beginning, you start in the middle, you begin with the instant today.

The day begins. The day is a crusher of paving-stones for the street that I hear in my room. I wanted in my way of nailing you down for myself for nothing to have modifications or definitions: everything would move in a circular motion.

Sometimes I feel that Angela is electronic. Is she a high-precision machine or a test-tube baby? Is she made of screws and springs? Or is she the living half of me? Angela is more than I myself. Angela doesn’t know she’s a character. Besides I too might be the character of myself. Could it be Angela feels that she’s a character? Because, as for me, I sometimes feel that I am someone’s character. It’s uncomfortable being two: me for me and me for others. I live in my hermitage which I only leave to exist in myself: Angela Pralini. Angela is my necessity. But I still don’t know why Angela lives in a kind of constant prayer. A pagan prayer. Ever-new excommunicated terrors. She’s achieved a native language.

Angela doesn’t know herself, and she has no clear image of herself. There is a disconnection in her. She confuses in herself the “for-me” with the “from-me”! If she weren’t so dumbstruck and paralyzed by her own existence, she would also see herself from the outside in — and would discover that she is a voracious person: she eats with an intemperance bordering on complete greed as if bread were being taken from her very mouth. But she believes she’s merely dainty.

I’m sculpting Angela with stones from the hillsides, until I shape her into a statue. Then I breathe into her and she becomes animated and surpasses me.

You must not forget that I am basically different from Angela. Aside from everything else, the man I am, he tries anxiously in vain to follow the byzantine meanderings of a woman, with attics and corners and angles and living flesh — and suddenly spontaneous as a flower. I as a writer cast seeds. Angela Pralini was born of an ancient seed that I cast upon the hard soil millennia ago. To arrive at me were millennia upon the earth necessary?

How far do I go and where do I already start to be Angela? Are we fruit of the same tree? No — Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? she’s the waves of the sea. While I’m the dense and gloomy forest. I’m in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation, being an emanation of mine, she is I. I, the author: the unknown. It’s by mere coincidence that I am I. Angela seems like something intimate that became exteriorized. Angela is not a “character.” She’s the evolution of a feeling. She’s an idea incarnated in the being. In the beginning there was only the idea. Then the word came into contact with the idea. And then the word was no longer mine: it transcended me, it was everyone’s, it was Angela’s.

I’ve always wanted to find someday a person who would live for me because life is so full of useless things that I can only bear it through extreme muscular asthenia, I suffer from moral indolence in living. I tried to make Angela live in my place — but she too wants only the climax of life.

Maybe I created Angela in order to have a dialogue with myself? I invented Angela because I need to invent myself — Angela is a startled woman.

All I know I cannot prove. What I imagine is real, or else on what basis could I imagine Angela, who roars, bellows, moans, pants, bleating and growling and grunting.

I feel as though I’ve already secretly achieved what I wanted and I still don’t know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called “experience”?

AUTHOR: I fear when the earth was formed. What a tremendous cosmic boom.

Through layer upon subterranean layer I reach the first man created. I reach the past of others. I recall this infinite and impersonal past which is without intelligence: it’s organic and it’s what worries me. I didn’t begin with myself when I was born. I began when the slow dinosaurs had begun. Or better yet: nothing begins. It’s like this: only when man takes notice through his simple gaze does a beginning appear to him. Yet — I give the appearance of contradiction — I already began many times. I’m beginning right now. As for Angela, she was born with me now, she strains to exist. Except I’m marginalized despite having a wife and kids — marginalized because I write. For instead of following the already-opened road I took a detour. Detours are dangerous. Whereas Angela is compliant and social.

Angela has within her water and desert, populace and hermitage, abundance and neediness, fear and defiance. She has within her eloquence and absurd muteness, surprise and antiquity, refinement and crudeness. She’s baroque.

I extract my feelings and words from my absolute night.

The difference between me and Angela can be felt. I cloistered in my narrow, anguished little world, not knowing how to leave to breathe in the beauty of what’s outside me. Angela, agile, graceful, full of the ringing of bells. I, seemingly bound to a destiny. Angela with the lightness of someone who has no end.

Angela is continually being made and has no obligations to her own life or to literature or any art, she’s purposeless.

Angela consoles herself for existing by thinking: “I at least have the advantage of being me, and not some random stranger.”

I tame Angela. I have to cross mountains and desolate areas, flattened by cyclonic storms, inundated by torrential rains and scorched by a high and voracious sun as merciless as ideal justice. I traverse this woman like a ghost train, across hills and valleys, through sleeping cities. My hope is to find the slightest hint of an answer. I advance with caution.

— I know that in Montserrat — mountains of intimate comfort and pure solitude — some ceramic objects were found from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, and the skeletons of two Iberians, the people who primitively inhabited the region. This awakens an excited soul that flickers within me at the mercy of unfettered winds. I wish I could make Angela aware of it but I don’t know how to fit into her life this knowledge that implies an exit from oneself into the terrain that is clear and of pure information. Precious information that situates me millennia ago and fascinates me with the dryness of the communication of the phrase.

Cold and stupefying.

I imagined the clear sound of drops of water falling into water — except that this minimal, delicate noise would be amplified beyond sound, in enormous crystalline drops with a wet ringing of bells sinking. In the cold and stupefying air the statues asleep.

I am writing by groping along.

Could it be I really know that I am I? This question arises because I notice that Angela doesn’t seem to know herself. She doesn’t realize that there is a center inside her and that it’s hard as a nut. From which words radiate. Phosphorescent.

Dejection. The taste of a crushed cigarette.

Sensation is the soul of the world. Is intelligence a sensation? In Angela it is.

I recognize that my imitators are better than I am. Imitation is more refined than raw authenticity. I am under the impression that I’ve been imitating myself a bit. The worst plagiarism is plagiarizing yourself. The struggle is hard: if I am weak I shall die. As for Angela, I must say that I know perfectly well that she’s only a character. I’m absolutely lucid and can speak with some objectivity. But what I don’t understand is why I invented Angela Pralini. It was to deceive someone. Perhaps. The little popularity I have displeases me. And then there are my imitators. But what about me? What style should I turn to if I’ve already been so used and handled by some people who had the bad taste of being me? I’ll write a book so closed that it will only allow passage to a few. Or perhaps I’ll never write again. I know nothing. The future — as Angela would say — weighs down on me by the ton. I’m lost on this Sunday that’s neither hot nor cold, having already taken refuge in a movie theater.