Your eye falls on the beginning of the book. “But this isn’t the book I was reading.... Same title, same cover, everything the same ... But it’s another book! One of the two is a fake.”
“Of course it’s a fake,” Ludmilla says, in a low voice.
“Are you saying it’s a fake because it passed through Marana’s hands? But the book I was reading was also one he had sent to Cavedagna! Can they both be fake?”
“There’s only one person who can tell us the truth: the author.”
“You can ask him, since you’re a friend of his....”
“I was.”
“Was it to him that you went, when you ran away from Marana?”
“You know everything!” she says, with an ironic tone that gets on your nerves more than anything else.
Reader, you have made up your mind: you will go to see the writer. Meanwhile, turning your back on Ludmilla, you have begun reading the new book contained inside the same cover.
(Same up to a point. The band LATEST BEST SELLER BY SILAS FLANNERY covers the last word of the title. You would only have to raise it to realize that this novel is not entitled In a network of lines that enlace like the other one; it is called In a network of lines that intersect.)
In a network of lines that intersect
Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me. According to Plotinus, the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason. Maybe this is why I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity. (The adjective here assumes all its meanings: I am at once a man who thinks and a businessman, and a collector of optical instruments as well.)
The moment I put my eye to a kaleidoscope, I feel that my mind, as the heterogeneous fragments of colors and lines assemble to compose regular figures, immediately discovers the procedure to be followed: even if it is only the peremptory and ephemeral revelation of a rigorous construction that comes to pieces at the slightest tap of a fingernail on the side of the tube, to be replaced by another, in which the same elements converge in a dissimilar pattern.
Ever since I realized, when still an adolescent, that the contemplation of the enameled gardens jumbled at the bottom of a well of mirrors stirred my aptitude for practical decisions and bold prognostications, I have been collecting kaleidoscopes. The history of this relatively recent object (the kaleidoscope was patented in 1817 by the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, author of a Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments, among other works) confined my collection within narrow chronological boundaries. But it was not long before I extended my investigations to a far more illustrious and inspiring antiquarian field: the catoptric instruments of the seventeenth century, little theaters of various design where a figure is seen multiplied by the variation of the angles between the mirrors. My aim is to reconstruct the museum assembled by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, author of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646) and inventor of the “polydyptic theater,” in which about sixty little mirrors lining the inside of a large box transform a bough into a forest, a lead soldier into an army, a booklet into a library.
The businessmen to whom, before meetings, I show the collection glance with superficial curiosity at these bizarre apparatuses. They don’t know that I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.
It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move. For this reason, if I were not afraid of being misunderstood, I would have nothing against reconstructing, in my house, the room completely lined with mirrors according to Kircher’s design, in which I would see myself walking on the ceiling, head down, as if I were flying upward from the depths of the floor.
These pages I am writing should also transmit a cold luminosity, as in a mirrored tube, where a finite number of figures are broken up and turned upside down and multiplied. If my figure sets out in all directions and is doubled at every corner, it is to discourage those who want to pursue me. I am a man with many enemies, whom I must constantly elude. When they think they have overtaken me, they will strike only a glass surface on which one of the many reflections of my ubiquitous presence appears and vanishes. I am also a man who pursues his numerous enemies, looming over them and advancing in invincible phalanxes and blocking their path whichever way they turn. In a catoptric world enemies can equally believe that they are surrounding me from every side, but I alone know the arrangement of the mirrors and can put myself out of their reach, while they end up jostling and seizing one another.
I would like my story to express all this through details of financial operations, sudden dramatic shifts at board meetings, telephone calls from brokers in panic, and then also bits of the map of the city, insurance policies, Lorna’s mouth when that sentence escaped her, Elfrida’s gaze as if pondering some inexorable calculation of hers, one image superimposed on the other, the grid of the map of the city dotted with x’s and arrows, motorcycles zooming off and vanishing into the comers of the mirror, motorcycles converging on my Mercedes.
Ever since it became clear to me that my kidnapping would be the exploit most desired not only by the various bands of specialist crooks but also by my leading colleagues and rivals in the world of high finance, I have realized that only by multiplying myself, multiplying my person, my presence, my exits from the house, and my returns, in short the opportunities for an ambush, could I make my falling into enemy hands more improbable. So I then ordered five Mercedes sedans exactly like mine, which enter and leave the armored gate of my villa at all hours, escorted by the motorcyclists of my bodyguard, and bearing inside a shadow, bundled up, dressed in black, who could be me or an ordinary stand-in. The companies of which I am president consist of initials with nothing behind them and some headquarters in interchangeable empty rooms; therefore my business meetings can be held at constantly varying addresses which for greater safety I order changed at the last minute each time. More delicate problems stem from my extramarital relationship with a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée, Lorna by name, to whom I devote two and sometimes three weekly sessions of two and three-quarters hours. To protect Lorna the only thing to do was to make it impossible to locate her, and the system to which I have resorted is that of parading a multiplicity of simultaneous amorous encounters, so that it is impossible to understand which are my counterfeit mistresses and which is the real one. Every day both I and my doubles visit, on constantly changing schedules, pied-á-terres scattered all over the city and inhabited by attractive women. This network of false mistresses allows me to conceal my true meetings with Lorna also from my wife, Elfrida, to whom I have presented this extravaganza as a security measure. As for Elfrida, my advice that she give maximum publicity to her movements in order to foil possible criminal plans has not found her prepared to listen to me. Elfrida tends to hide, just as she avoids the mirrors in my collection, as if she feared her image would be shattered by them and destroyed: an attitude whose deeper motives escape me and which vexes me not a little.
I would like all the details that I am writing down to concur in creating the impression of a high-precision mechanism, but at the same time of a succession of dazzles that reflect something that remains out of eyeshot For this reason I must not neglect to insert every so often, at the points where the plot becomes thi
ckest, some quotation from an ancient text: for example, a passage from the De Magia Naturale of Giovanni Battista della Porta, where he says that the magician—that is, the “minister of Nature”—must know “the reasons that the sight is deceived, the images that are produced under water, and in mirrors made in various forms, which at times dispel images from the mirrors, suspended in the air, and he must know how things done at a distance may be clearly seen.”
I soon realized that the uncertainty created by the coming and going of identical automobiles would not suffice to avert the danger of criminal traps: I then thought to apply the multiplying power of catoptric mechanisms to the bandits themselves, organizing false ambushes and false kidnappings of some counterfeit of myself, followed by fake releases after the payment of fake ransoms. For these I had to assume the task of setting up a parallel criminal organization, making more and more intimate contacts with the underworld. I thus came to have at my disposal considerable information on various kidnappings in the works, being thus able to act in time, both to protect myself and to exploit the misfortunes of my business adversaries.
At this point the story could mention that among the virtues of mirrors that the ancient books discuss there is also that of revealing distant and hidden things. The Arab geographers of the Middle Ages, in their descriptions of the harbor of Alexandria, recall the column that stood on the island of Pharos, surmounted by a steel mirror in which, from an immense distance, the ships proceeding off Cyprus and Constantinople and all the lands of the Romans can be seen. Concentrating the rays, curved mirrors can catch an image of the whole. “God Himself, who cannot be seen either by the body or by the soul,” Porphyry writes, “allows himself to be contemplated in a mirror.” Together with the centrifugal radiation that projects my image along all the dimensions of space, I would like these pages also to render the opposite movement, through which I receive from the mirrors images that direct sight cannot embrace. From mirror to mirror—this is what I happen to dream of—the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.
This and nothing else must have been the power of the magic mirrors that are so often mentioned in treatises of the occult sciences and in anathemas of the Inquisitors: to force the God of Darkness to display himself and to join his image with the one the mirror reflects. I had to extend my collection into another field: dealers and auction houses all over the whole world have been alerted to hold for me the extremely rare examples of those Renaissance mirrors which, through their form or through tradition, can be classified as magic.
It was a difficult game, in which every mistake could cost dearly. My first wrong move was persuading my rivals to join me in founding an insurance company against kidnappings. Sure of my network of information in the underworld, I thought I could retain control over every eventuality. I soon learned that my associates maintained even closer relations with the kidnap bands than I did. For the next kidnapping, the ransom demanded would be all the capital of the insurance company; this would then be divided between the outlaws’ organization and their accomplices, the stockholders of the company, all this naturally to the disadvantage of the kidnapped person. As to the identity of this victim, there were no doubts: it was to be me.
The plan to trap me envisaged that between the Honda motorcycles of my escort and the armored car in which I rode, three Yamaha motorcycles would interpose themselves, ridden by three false policemen, who would suddenly slam on their brakes before the curve. According to my counterplan, there would instead be three Suzuki motorcycles which would block my Mercedes five hundred meters before, in a fake kidnapping. When I saw myself blocked by three Kawasaki motorcycles at an intersection before the other two, I realized that my counterplan had been frustrated by a counter-counterplan whose author I did not know.
As in a kaleidoscope, the hypotheses I would like to record in these lines break up and diverge, just as before my eyes the map of the city became segmented when I dismantled it piece by piece to locate the crossroads where, according to my informers, the trap would be set for me, and to establish the point at which I could get ahead of my enemies so as to upset their plan in my own favor. Everything now seemed assured to me; the magic mirror brought together all the malevolent powers, putting them at my service. I had not taken into consideration a third kidnapping plan arranged by persons unknown. By whom?
To my great surprise, instead of taking me to a secret hideaway, my kidnappers accompany me to my house, lock me in the catoptric room I had reconstructed with such care from the designs of Athanasius Kircher. The mirror walls reflect on my image an infinite number of times. Had I been kidnapped by myself? Had one of my images cast into the world taken my place and relegated me to the role of reflected image? Had I summoned the Prince of Darkness and was he appearing to me in my own likeness?
On the mirror floor a woman’s body lies, bound. It is Lorna. If she makes the slightest movement, her naked flesh unfolds, repeated on all the mirrors. I fling myself upon her, to free her from her bonds and gag, to embrace her; but she turns on me, infuriated. “You think you have me in your hands? You’re mistaken!” And she digs her nails into my face. Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?
Meanwhile a door has opened. Elfrida comes forward. “I knew of the danger threatening you and I managed to save you,” she says. “The method may have been a bit brutal, but I had no choice. But now I can’t find the door of this cage of mirrors any more. Tell me, quickly, how can I get out?”
One eye and one eyebrow of Elfrida, one leg in its tight boot, the corner of her mouth with its thin lips and too-white teeth, a beringed hand clutching a revolver are repeated, enlarged by the mirrors, and among these lacerated fragments of her figure intrude patches of Lorna’s skin, like landscapes of flesh. Already I can distinguish no longer what belongs to one and what belongs to the other, I am lost, I seem to have lost myself, I cannot see my reflection but only theirs. In a fragment of Novalis, an adept who has managed to reach the secret dwelling of Isis lifts the veil of the goddess.... Now it seems to me that everything that surrounds me is a part of me, that I have managed to become the whole, finally....
[8]
From the diary of Silas Flannery
In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven.
How many years has it been since I could allow myself some disinterested reading? How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself? I turn and see the desk waiting for me, the typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it, the chapter to begin. Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me. What I do has as its aim the spiritual state of this woman in the deck chair framed by the lens of my spyglass, and it is a condition forbidden me.
Every day, before starting work, I look at the woman in the deck chair: I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into
what in her is most personal and incommunicable.
At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.
At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.
At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It’s no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.