Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (11 page)

Adelina and I suddenly found ourselves alone in that great silence which reigns at two o’clock in the morning. She came to me and kissed me on the cheek, on the very spot where the flesh caves in a little. Then she began gathering up the dirty glasses and side plates, the ashtrays filled to the brim with cigarette butts. I helped her to clear up, more out of kindness than necessity. We both knew it and were kind to each other. And although she could not stay the night, she lingered a while, my arm around her shoulder, as seemed appropriate under the circumstances. We spoke of vague and forgotten things, and all of a sudden, as if suddenly remembering, I interrupted our aimless conversation and explained, “I’m experimenting with a paint spray. That Antonio. But he’s right.” Adelina said nothing, not even as much as “Really?” She became rather more restless when she felt it was time to go and asked me with some formality, “Could I ask you to drive me home?” Her car was being repaired, and it had already been agreed that I would take her home after our little reunion (or party). I replied, “Of course,” which was the answer she expected.

I left her on the corner of the road where she lives (her mother does not approve of me dropping her off right outside the door) and I sat there watching her as she walked along the pavement, one minute visible beneath the light of the streetlamps, the next minute hidden in the shadows between one lamp and another, until I could see her struggling with the lock before disappearing inside the building. I started the engine up gently, moving off slowly and heading across the city. This is something I enjoy doing from time to time: driving at my leisure through the deserted streets as if I were curb-crawling, and women look at me puzzled and intrigued when I drive on without so much as looking at them. Sometimes, on the other hand, I do stare at them, knowing what they are hoping for but not likely to get from me, before driving on, not to the end of the night but through a night I did not know how to end. Not entirely true on this occasion: there were the usual streets and women, and men, too, passing in the shadows, and cats knocking over sacks of garbage and the terrible glare of asphalt, and the lamps, and water dribbling here and there, but inside the car I was being carried rather than driving, empty, without a thought in my head, brutalized. Because I was driving so slowly (and not for the first time), a policeman stopped me and wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I explained (an excuse which had become second nature) that the engine was giving me trouble, that I was driving slowly to see if I could manage to get home. Through my rear mirror I could see the policeman was taking down my number as a precaution, craning his neck to catch the light from the streetlamp. This worthy upholder of law and order was simply doing his job. Were I to be found lying injured or dead in the night, he would have important evidence to bring to any inquiry by stating his suspicions and the laudable precautions he took with civic foresight. And if any bombs were to go off in the night, the work of the Armed Resistance Movement or the Revolutionary Brigades, I would certainly be in trouble. However, I suffered no such mishap.

It was three-thirty when I parked my car in the Rua Camões. I was far from home, but I felt like having a stroll. I began walking uphill in the direction of the Rua Santa Catarina, and on reaching the Mirador, I went down to the railings and stood there gazing at the river, thinking of nothing, not a thought in my head, clearing my mind completely so that not even the lights of the ships should have any significance other than shining for no good reason. That was as much as I was prepared to concede. Finally I perched on one of the benches and, taken completely unawares, discovered I was weeping. If that could be called weeping. Perhaps our physiology has reasons unknown to our anxieties and emotions, hence the ability of women to weep in that fluent, continuous, uninterrupted fashion which can be so very moving, whereas men are said not to weep, or it is considered shameful if they do, because they have never been capable of tears and so some plausible excuse had to be invented. It is true that I have not enjoyed the privilege of watching a man weep and it would be wrong to judge others by myself, but I am honestly incapable of anything more than these two drops slowly being squeezed from my burning tear glands, drops so meager and oppressively concentrated that they do not roll down but remain there between the eyelids, slowly burning up, so slowly that I suddenly discover my eyes are dry. I would swear there had been no tears had there not been for a time, now beyond recovery, memory or recollection, a tremulous and glistening curtain between me and the outside world, as if I were inside a cave with a cascade at the entrance sending down great shining rivulets of water, but silent, apart from this buzzing inside my eyes, the burning sensation of that teardrop. I most certainly wept. For a moment or an hour, the white and amber lights coming from the ships and the other bank of the river were like sunlight in my eyes. Like all nearsighted people, I had the advantage of seeing not the light but its multiplication. Still sitting there, I later discovered that at some time, immeasurable because gone forever (and I became even more aware of it as the sounds of the city started up again and began penetrating my consciousness), I knew (or find it gives a nice
prosic
touch [Does the adjective exist?] now to say that I knew) that during the immeasurable time that had elapsed, I was alone in the world, the first man, the first tear, the first light and the final moments of unconsciousness. I then began to examine my life, to take a careful look, to rake over it like someone lifting stones in search of diamonds, wood lice or dense larvae of the white and plump variety which have never seen the sun and suddenly feel it on their soft skin, like a ghost incapable of revealing itself in any other way. I remained sitting there for the rest of the night, sometimes looking at the river, sometimes at the black sky and the stars (what more should a writer say about the stars other than to say he has looked at them? Lucky me who only writes like this and therefore feels no obligation to do any more), until just before daybreak there was some unexpected rain and the sky cleared to my left and the waters turned as gray as the sky. Bidding farewell to the shadows which continued to hover in the west, the lights gradually went out in various parts of the city. I felt somewhat humiliated that after such a night I would end up with a chill in my bones and receive a look of indifference from the first passerby I met on the road.

I am writing this at home, as you can see, after having slept for no more than four hours, and, convinced that it is essential and useful, or at least harmless even for me, I have decided to carry on writing, perhaps about my life past and present, or perhaps just about life, because it suddenly occurs to me that it might be easier to talk about life in general rather than about my own life. But how can I ever hope to recover all those years behind me, and not just mine, for they are inextricably mixed up with those of other people, and to rummage through mine is to disturb the years of others, which do not belong to me now or then, however gently or brutally I might invade them each moment we share or think we share? Perhaps no life can be narrated, because life is the superimposed pages of a book or layers of paint which, opened or stripped away for reading and looking at, immediately turn to dust and perish. The invisible force which linked them is missing, their own weight, agglutination and continuity. Life also consists of minutes which cannot be separated from each other, and time becomes a thick, dense and obscure mass in which we swim with difficulty, while overhead an unfathomable light begins to fade, a dawn withdrawing into the night from which it has just emerged. If I once read these things I am now writing, then I am copying them, but not deliberately. If I have never read them, then I am inventing them. If, on the other hand, I have read them, then I must have assimilated them and now have the right to use them as if they were my own and had just been invented.

I
WAS BORN
in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay call ourselves, and write our name, Crusoe, and so my companions always called me. I had two elder brothers, one of which was a lieutenant-colonel in an English regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Colonel Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards; what became of my second brother I never knew, any more than my father and mother did know what was become of me.

Since starting to write, I have copied texts on a number of occasions for one reason or another: to reinforce or contradict some statement of mine, or because I could not have expressed it better myself. Here I have done it to keep my hand in training, as if I were copying a picture. By transcribing and copying, I learn to narrate a life, moreover in the first person, and in this way I try to understand the art of penetrating this veil of words and ordering the insights words provide. But once having copied out a text, I am prepared to affirm that everything which has been written is a lie. Deceitful on the part of the copyist who was not born in 1632 in the city of York. Deceitful on the part of the author whom he copied, Daniel Defoe, who was born in 1661 in the city of London. The truth, if it exists, could only be that of Robinson Crusoe or Kreutznaer, and in order to recognize it would have meant proving its existence from the outset, that his father came from Bremen and passed through Hull, that his mother was in fact English, and that his first name was her family name, that two more sons were born to the couple and that what we stated really happened to them. The same truth would require confirmation that Colonel Lockhart and his regiment actually existed and, obviously, confirmation of the battles he fought, especially the one of Dunkirk against the Spaniards. (About the existence of the latter there is not the slightest doubt.) I do not believe that anyone could unravel these tangled threads, untie them, distinguish the genuine from the false and (an even more delicate task) define and register the degree of falsehood in the truth or truth in the falsehood. Of all that Daniel Defoe–Robinson Crusoe (the youngest of the three brothers) wrote and left behind I need only quote a few sober words: “Just as my parents were never to discover what happened to me.” Because I myself abandoned them? Or because they abandoned me? Willful neglect during their lifetime or orphanhood brought about by their death? For none of these reasons. Simply because any one of us could say these things about our parents or our children about us. Because I, the painter of portraits and the author of this narrative, have no descendants, or do not know them if they exist, or will exist in some future which still has to be written. Robinson Crusoe (we are told on the penultimate page of the story Defoe narrates on his behalf) had three children, two boys and one girl: useless information for any understanding of the text, but which confirms my belief in the importance of the superfluous.

I was born in Geneva in 1712, the offspring of citizen Isaac Rousseau and citizeness Suzanne Bernard. A most modest patrimony divided among fifteen children had reduced my father’s share to almost nothing, so that all he had to live on was his craft as a watchmaker, at which he truly excelled. My mother, the daughter of Pastor Bernard, was more affluent: she was bashful and comely. . . . I almost died at birth and was not expected to survive.

From the outset, these parents have the enormous advantage of being real and therefore promise greater veracity than all of Defoe’s fiction. No less real is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was born in the city of Geneva in 1712. But on faithfully copying down these lines with the honest intention of learning, I cannot see any difference, other than in the writing, between reality and fiction. I am convinced that for my life as narrated here (how could I narrate it elsewhere?) I can only rely on what someone later told Rousseau (for he himself was not conscious, or sufficiently conscious, to have known it then): “I almost died at birth.” Nor could I have known it when I was born, but unlike Jean-Jacques, I did not need anyone to come and tell me. Having been born, I was born at the beginning of my death, therefore, almost dead. The midwife who helped to deliver me from my mother’s womb probably remarked, “The child is full of life.” But she was mistaken.

Officially a Roman emperor is said to be born in Rome, but it was in Italica that I was born; it was upon that dry but fertile country that I later superposed so many regions of the world. The official fiction has some merit: it proves that decisions of the mind and of the will do prevail over circumstance. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself . . .