Serpents and skulls
In Mexico, Mr Palomar is visiting the ruins of Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs. A Mexican friend accompanies him, an impassioned and eloquent expert on pre-Columbian civilizations, who tells him beautiful legends about Quetzalcoatl. Before becoming a god, Quetzalcoatl was a king, with his palace here in Tula; a line of lopped-off columns remains, around an impluvium, a bit like a palace of ancient Rome.
The temple of the Morning Star is a step-pyramid. At the top stand four cylindrical caryatids, known as “Atlases”, who represent the god Quetzalcoatl as the Morning Star (through a butterfly they bear on their back, symbol of the star), and four carved columns, which represent the Plumed Serpent, the same god in animal form.
All this has to be taken on faith; for that matter, it would be hard to demonstrate the opposite. In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in. turn, for yet another something. An animal stands for a god who stands for a star that stands for an element or a human quality and so on. We are in the world of pictographic writing; the ancient Mexicans, to write, drew pictures, and even when they were drawing it was as if they were writing: every picture seems a rebus to be deciphered. Even the most abstract, geometric friezes on the wall of a temple can be interpreted as arrows if you see a motive of broken lines, or you can read a numerical sequence, depending on the way the key-pattern is repeated. Here in Tula the reliefs depict stylized animal forms: jaguars, coyotes. Mr Palomar’s Mexican friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.
A group of schoolchildren moves among the ruins: stocky boys with the features of the Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples, wearing a plain white uniform, like Boy Scouts, with blue neckerchiefs. The boys are led by a teacher not much taller than they are and only a little more adult, with the same round, dark, impassive face. They climb the top steps of the pyramid, stop beneath the columns, the teacher tells what civilization they belong to, what century, what stone they are carved from, then concludes, “We don’t know what they mean,” and the group follows him down the steps. At each statue, each figure carved in a relief or on a column, the teacher supplies some facts and then invariably adds, “We don’t know what it means.”
Here is a
chac-mool
, a very popular kind of statue: a human figure, half-reclining, holds a tray; on this tray – the experts are unanimous in saying – the bleeding hearts of the victims of human sacrifice were presented. These statues in and of themselves could also be seen as good-natured, rough puppets; but every time Mr Palomar sees one he cannot help shuddering.
The line of schoolboys passes. And the teacher is saying, “
Esto es un chac-mool
.
No se sabe lo quiere decir
,” and he moves on.
Though Mr Palomar continues to follow the explanation of his friend acting as guide, he always ends up crossing the path of the schoolboys and overhearing the teacher’s words. He is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation, allegorical readings, have always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind. But he feels attracted also by the opposite attitude of the schoolteacher: what had at first seemed only a brisk lack of interest is being revealed to him as a scholarly and pedagogical position, a methodological choice by this serious and conscientious young man, a rule from which he will not swerve. A stone, a figure, a sign, a word that reach us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, it is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.
Behind the pyramid there is a passage or communication trench between two walls, one of packed earth, the other of carved stone: the Wall of the Serpents. It is perhaps the most beautiful piece in Tula: in the relief-frieze there is a sequence of serpents, each holding a human skull in its open jaws, as if it were about to devour it.
The boys go by. The teacher says, “This is the wall of the serpents. Each serpent has a skull in its mouth. We don’t know what they mean.”
Mr Palomar’s friend cannot contain himself: “Yes, we do! It’s the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life without death . . .”
The boys listen, mouths agape, black eyes dazed. Mr Palomar thinks that every translation requires another translation and so on. He asks himself, “What did death, life, continuity, passage mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean today for these boys? And for me?” And yet he knows he could never suppress in himself the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and re-weave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible. Once the school group has disappeared around a corner, the stubborn voice of the little teacher resumes: “
No es verdad
, it is not true, what that
señor
said. We don’t know what they mean.”
The odd slipper
While traveling in an eastern country, Mr Palomar bought a pair of slippers in a bazaar. Returning home, he tries to put them on: he realizes that one slipper is wider than the other and will not stay on his foot. He recalls the old vendor crouched on his heels in a niche of the bazaar in front of a pile of slippers of every size, at random; he sees the man as he rummages in the pile to find a slipper suited to the customer’s foot, has him try it on, then starts rummaging again to hand him the presumed mate, which Mr Palomar accepts without trying it on.
“Perhaps now,” Mr Palomar thinks, “another man is walking around that country with a mismated pair of slippers.” And he sees a slender shadow moving over the desert with a limp, a slipper falling off his foot at every step, or else, too tight, imprisoning a twisted foot. “Perhaps he, too, at this moment is thinking of me, hoping to run into me and make the trade. The relationship binding us is more concrete and clear than many of the relationships established between human beings. And yet we will never meet.” He decides to go on wearing these odd slippers out of solidarity towards his unknown companion in misfortune, to keep alive this complementary relationship that is so rare, this mirroring of limping steps from one continent to another.
He lingers over this image, but he knows it does not correspond to the truth. An avalanche of slippers, sewn on an assembly-line, comes periodically to top up the old merchant’s pile in a bazaar. At the bottom of the pile there will always remain two odd slippers, but until the old merchant exhausts his supply (and perhaps he will never exhaust it, and after his death the shop with all its merchandise will pass to his heirs and to the heirs of his heirs), it will suffice to search in the pile and one slipper will always be found to match another slipper. A mistake can occur only with an absent-minded customer like himself, but centuries can go by before the consequences of this mistake affect another visitor to that ancient bazaar. Every process of disintegration in the order of the world is irreversible; the effects, however, are hidden and delayed by the dust-cloud of the great numbers, which contains virtually limitless possibilities of new symmetries, combinations, pairings.
But what if his mistake had simply erased an earlier mistake? What if his absent-mindedness had been the bearer not of disorder but of order? “Perhaps the merchant knew what he was doing,” Mr Palomar thinks. “In giving me that mismated slipper, he was righting a disparity that had been hidden for centuries in that pile of slippers, handed down from generation to generation in that bazaar.”
The unknown companion was limping perhaps in another period, the symmetry of their steps responded not only from one continent to another but over a distance of centuries. This does not make Mr Palomar feel less solidarity with him. He goes on shuffling awkwardly, to afford relief to his shadow.
PALOMAR IN SOCIETY
On biting the tongue
In a time and in a country where everyone goes out of his way to announce opinions or hand down judgements, Mr Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before asserting anything. After the bite, if he is still convinced of what he was going to say, he says it. If not, he keeps his mouth shut. In fact, he spends whole weeks, months in silence.
Good opportunities for keeping quiet are never in short supply, but there are also rare occasions when Mr Palomar regrets not having said something he could have said at the right moment. He realizes that events have confirmed what he was thinking and if he had expressed his thoughts at the time, he would have had a positive influence, however slight, on what then ensued. In these cases his spirit is torn between self-satisfaction for having seen things properly and a sense of guilt because of his excessive reserve. Both feelings are so strong that he is tempted to put them into words; but after having bitten his tongue three times, or rather six, he is convinced he has no cause either for pride or for remorse.
Having had the correct view is nothing meritorious: statistically, it is almost inevitable that among the many cockeyed, confused or banal ideas that come into his mind, there should also be some perspicacious ideas, even ideas of genius; and as they occurred to him, they can surely have occurred also to somebody else.
Opinion on his having refrained from expressing his idea is more open to debate. In times of general silence, conforming to the silence of the majority is certainly culpable. In times when everybody says too much, the important thing is not merely to say what is right, which in any event would be lost in the flood of words, but to say it on the basis of premisses, suggesting also consequences, so that what is said acquires the maximum value. But then, if the value of a single affirmation lies in the continuity and coherence of the discourse in which it is uttered, the only possible choice is between speaking continuously or never speaking at all. In the first case Mr Palomar would reveal that his thinking does not proceed in a straight line but zigzags its way through vacillations, denials, corrections, in whose midst the rightness of that affirmation of his would be lost. As for the other alternative, it implies an art of keeping silent even more difficult than the art of speaking.
In fact, silence can also be considered a kind of speech, since it is a rejection of the use to which others put words; but the meaning of this silent speech lies in its interruptions, in what is, from time to time, actually said, giving a meaning to what is unsaid.
Or rather: a silence can serve to dismiss certain words or else to hold them in reserve for use on a better occasion. Just as a word spoken now can save a hundred words tomorrow or else can necessitate the saying of another thousand. “Every time I bite my tongue,” Mr Palomar concludes mentally, “I must think not only of what I am about to say or not say, but also of everything that, whether I say it or do not say it, will be said or not said by me or by others.” Having formulated this thought, he bites his tongue and remains silent.
On becoming angry with the young
In a time when young people’s impatience with the old and old people’s impatience with the young has reached its peak, when the old do nothing but store up arguments with which to tell the young finally what they deserve, and when the young are waiting only for these occasions in order to show the old that they understand nothing, Mr Palomar is unable to utter a word. If he sometimes tries to speak up, he realizes that all are too intent on the theses they are defending to pay any attention to what he is trying to clarify to himself.
The fact is that he would like not so much to affirm a truth of his own as to ask questions, and he realizes that no one wants to abandon the train of his own discourse to answer questions that, coming from another discourse, would necessitate rethinking the same things with other words, perhaps ending up on strange ground, far from safe paths. Or else he would like others to ask him questions; but he, too, would want only certain questions and not others: the ones to which he would answer by saying the things he feels he can say but could say only if someone asked him to say them. In any event, nobody has the slightest idea of asking him anything.
In this situation Mr Palomar confines himself to brooding privately on the difficulty of speaking to the young.
He thinks: “The difficulty lies in the fact that between us and them there is an unbridgeable gap. Something has happened between our generation and theirs, a continuity of experience has been broken: we no longer have any common reference points.”
Then he thinks: “No, the difficulty lies in the fact that every time I am about to reproach or criticize or exhort or advise them, I think that as a young man I also attracted reproaches, criticism, exhortation, advice of the same sort, and I never listened to any of it. Times were different and as a result there were many differences in behavior, language, customs; but my mental processes then were not very different from theirs today. So I have no authority to speak.”