Mr Palomar Read online

  Every bather swimming westwards at this hour sees the strip of light aimed at him, which then dies out just a bit beyond the spot where his arm extends: each has his own reflection, which has that direction only for him and moves with him. On either side of the reflection, the water’s blue is darker. “Is that the only non-illusory datum, common to all: darkness?” Mr Palomar wonders. But the sword is imposed equally on the eye of each swimmer; there is no avoiding it. “Is what we have in common precisely what is given to each of us as something exclusively his?”

  The sailboards slide over the water, cutting with sidelong swerves the land wind that springs up at this hour. Erect figures hold the boom with arms extended like archers’, competing for the air that snaps the canvas. When they cross the reflection, in the midst of the gold that enshrouds them the colors of the sails are muted and the outline of opaque bodies seems to enter the night.

  “All this is happening not on the sea, not in the sun,” the swimmer Palomar thinks, “but inside my head, in the circuits between eyes and brain. I am swimming in my mind; this sword of light exists only there; and this is precisely what attracts me. This is my element, the only one I can know in some way.”

  But he also thinks: “I cannot reach it: it is always there ahead, it cannot be at once inside me and something inside which I am swimming; if I see it I remain outside it, and it remains outside.”

  His strokes have become weary and hesitant; you would think that all his reasoning, rather than increase his pleasure in swimming in the reflection, is spoiling it for him, making him feel it as a limitation, or a guilt, or a condemnation. And also a responsibility he cannot escape: the sword exists only because he is there; and if he were to go away, if all the swimmers and craft were to return to the shore, or simply turn their backs on the sun, where would the sword end? In the disintegrating world the thing he would like to save is the most fragile: that sea-bridge between his eyes and the sinking sun. Mr Palomar no longer feels like swimming; he is cold. But he goes on: now he is obliged to stay in the water until the sun has disappeared.

  Then he thinks: “If I see and think and swim the reflection, it is because at the other extreme there is the sun that casts its rays. Only the origin of what is matters: something that my gaze cannot face except in an attenuated form, as in this sunset. All the rest is reflection among reflections, me included.”

  The ghost of a sail passes; the shadow of the man-mast flows among the luminous scales. “Without the wind this trap put together with plastic joints, human bones and tendons, nylon sheets, would not stand up; it is the wind that makes it a craft that seems endowed with an end and a purpose of its own; it is only the wind that knows where the surf and the surfer are heading,” he thinks. What a relief it would be if he could manage to cancel his partial and doubting ego in the certitude of a principle from which everything is derived! A single, absolute principle from which actions and forms are derived? Or else a certain number of distinct principles, lines of force that intersect, giving a form to the world as it appears, unique, instant by instant?

  “. . . the wind and, obviously, the sea, the mass of water that supports the floating and shifting solid bodies, like me and the sailboard,” Palomar thinks, in a dead-man’s float.

  His upside-down gaze now contemplates the straying clouds and the hills clouded with woods. His ego is also turned upside down in the elements: the celestial fire, the racing air, the water-cradle and the earth-support. Can this be nature? But nothing of what he sees exists in nature: the sun does not set, the sea does not have this color, the shapes are not those that the light casts on his retina. With unnatural movements of his limbs, he is floating among phantoms; human forms in unnatural positions, shifting their weight to exploit not the wind but the geometrical abstraction of an angle made by wind and the tilting of an artificial device, and thus they glide over the smooth skin of the sea. Does nature not exist?

  The swimming ego of Mr Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of fields of force, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like a lump, like a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here but could not be here, in a world that could not be, but is.

  An intrusive wave troubles the smooth sea; a motorboat bursts forth and speeds off, spilling fuel and skipping on its flat belly. In greasy, multicolored glints the skin of oil spreads out, rippling in the water; that material consistency lacking in the glint of the sun cannot be doubted thanks to this trace of the physical presence of man, who scatters excess fuel in his wake, detritus of combustion, residues that cannot be assimilated, mixing and multiplying the life and death around him.

  “This is my habitat,” Palomar thinks, “which it is not a question of accepting or rejecting, because I can exist only here, within it.” But if the fate of life on earth were already sealed? If the race towards death were to become stronger than any possibility of rescue?

  The wave flows, a solitary breaker, until it crashes on the shore; and where there seemed to be only sand, gravel, seaweeds and minute shells, the withdrawal of the water now reveals a margin of beach dotted with cans, peanuts, condoms, dead fish, plastic bottles, broken clogs, syringes, twigs black with oil.

  Lifted also by the motorboat’s wave, swept off by the tide of residue, Mr Palomar suddenly feels like flotsam amid flotsam, a corpse rolling on the garbage-beaches of the cemetery-continents. If no eye except the glassy eye of the dead were to open again on the surface of the terraqueous globe, the sword would not gleam any more.

  When you come to think about it, such a situation is not new: for millions of centuries the sun’s rays rested on the water before there were eyes capable of perceiving them.

  Mr Palomar swims under water, surfaces; there is the sword! One day an eye emerged from the sea, and the sword, already there waiting for it, could finally display its fine, sharp tip and its gleaming splendor. They were made for each other, sword and eye: and perhaps it was not the birth of the eye that caused the birth of the sword, but vice versa, because the sword had to have an eye to observe it at its climax.

  Mr Palomar thinks of the world without him: that endless world before his birth, and that far more obscure world after his death; he tries to imagine the world before eyes, any eyes; and a world that tomorrow, through catastrophe or slow corrosion, will be left blind. What happens (happened, will happen) in that world? Promptly an arrow of light sets out from the sun, is reflected in the calm sea, sparkles in the tremolo of the water; and then matter becomes receptive to light, is differentiated into living tissues, and all of a sudden an eye, a multitude of eyes, burgeons, or reburgeons . . .

  Now all the sailboards have been pulled ashore, and the last shivering swimmer – Palomar by name – also comes out of the water. He has become convinced that the sword will exist even without him: finally he dries himself with a soft towel and goes home.

  PALOMAR IN THE GARDEN

  * * *

  The loves of the tortoises

  There are two tortoises on the patio: a male and a female. Zlak! Zlak! their shells strike each other. It is the season of their love-making.

  The male pushes the female sideways, all around the edge of the paving. The female seems to resist his attack, or at least she opposes a somewhat inert immobility. The male is smaller and more active; he seems younger. He tries repeatedly to mount her, from behind, but the back of her shell is steep and he slides off.

  Now he must have succeeded in achieving the right position: he thrusts with rhythmic, cadenced strokes; at every thrust he emits a kind of gasp, almost a cry. The female has her foreclaws flattened against the ground, enabling her to raise her hind part. The male scratches with his foreclaws on her shell, his neck stuck out, his mouth gaping. The problem with these shells is that there’s no way to get a hold; and, in fact, the claws can find no purchase.

  Now she escapes him, he pursues her. N
ot that she is faster or particularly determined to run away: to restrain her he gives her some little nips on one leg, always the same one. She does not rebel. Every time she stops, the male tries to mount her; but she takes a little step forward and he topples off, slamming his member on the ground. This member is fairly long, hooked in a way that apparently makes it possible for him to reach her even though the thickness of the shells and their awkward positioning separates them. So there is no telling how many of these attacks achieve their purpose or how many fail, or how many are theater, play-acting.

  It is summer; the patio is bare, except for one green jasmine in a corner. The courtship consists of making so many turns around the little patch of grass, with pursuits and flights and skirmishing not of the claws but of the shells, which strike in a dull clicking. The female tries to find refuge among the stalks of the jasmine; she believes – or wants to make others believe – that she does this to hide; but actually this is the surest way to remain blocked by the male, held immobile with no avenue of escape. Now it is likely that he has managed to introduce his member properly; but this time they are both completely still, silent.

  The sensations of the pair of mating tortoises are something Mr Palomar cannot imagine. He observes them with a cold attention, as if they were two machines: two electronic tortoises programmed to mate. What does eros become if there are plates of bone or horny scales in the place of skin? But what we call eros – is it perhaps only a program of our corporeal bodies, more complicated because the memory receives messages from every cell of the skin, from every molecule of our tissues, and multiplies them and combines them with the impulses transmitted by our eyesight and with those aroused by the imagination? The difference lies only in the number of circuits involved: from our receptors billions of wires extend, linked with the computer of feelings, conditionings, the ties between one person and another . . . Eros is a program that unfolds in the electronic clusters of the mind, but the mind is also skin: skin touched, seen, remembered. And what about the tortoises, enclosed in their insensitive casing? The poverty of their sensorial stimuli perhaps drives them to a concentrated, intense mental life, leads them to a crystalline inner awareness . . . Perhaps the eros of tortoises obeys absolute spiritual laws, while we are prisoners of a machinery whose functioning remains unknown to us, prone to clogging up, stalling, exploding in uncontrolled automatisms . . .

  Do the tortoises understand themselves any better? After about ten minutes of mating, the two shells separate. She ahead, he behind, they resume their circling of the grass. Now the male remains more distanced, every now and then he scratches his claws against her shell, he climbs on her for a little, but without much conviction. They go back under the jasmine. He gives her a nip or two on one leg, always in the same place.

  The blackbird’s whistle

  Mr Palomar is lucky in one respect: he spends the summer in a place where many birds sing. As he sits in a deck-chair and “works” (in fact, he is lucky also in another respect: he can say he is working in places and attitudes that would suggest complete repose; or rather, he suffers this handicap: he feels obliged never to stop working, even when lying under the trees on an August morning), the invisible birds among the boughs around him display a repertory of the most varied manifestations of sound; they enfold him in an acoustic space that is irregular, discontinuous, jagged; but thanks to an equilibrium established among the various sounds, none of which outdoes the others in intensity or frequency, all is woven into a homogeneous texture, held together not by harmony but by lightness and transparency. Until the hour of greatest heat, when the fierce horde of insects asserts its absolute domination of the vibrations of the air, systematically filling the dimensions of time and space with the deafening and ceaseless hammering of cicadas.

  The birds’ song occupies a variable part of Mr Palomar’s auditory attention: at times he ignores it as a component of the basic silence, at other times he concentrates on distinguishing, within it, one song from another, grouping them into categories of increasing complexity: punctiform chirps; two-note trills (one note long, one short); brief, vibrato whistling; gurgles, little cascades of notes that pour down, spin out, then stop; twirls of modulation that twist upon themselves, and so on, to extended warbling.

  Mr Palomar does not arrive at a less generic classification: he is not one of those people who, on hearing a bird-call, can identify the bird it belongs to. This ignorance makes him feel guilty. The new knowledge the human race is acquiring does not compensate for the knowledge spread only by direct oral transmission, which, once lost, cannot be regained or retransmitted: no book can teach what can be learned only in childhood if you lend an alert ear and eye to the song and flight of birds and if you find someone who knows how to give them a specific name. Rather than the cultivation of precise nomenclature and classification, Palomar had preferred the constant pursuit of a precision unsure in defining the modulating, the shifting, the composite. Today he would make the opposite choice, and following the train of thoughts stirred by the birds’ singing, he sees his life as a series of missed opportunities.

  Among all the cries of the birds, the blackbird’s whistle stands out, unmistakable for any other. The blackbirds arrive in the late afternoon; there are two of them, a couple certainly, perhaps the same couple as last year, as every year at this season. Each afternoon, hearing a whistled summons, on two notes, like the signal of a person wishing to announce his arrival, Mr Palomar raises his head to look around for whoever is calling him. Then he remembers that this is the blackbirds’ hour. He soon glimpses them: they walk on the lawn as if their true vocation were to be earth-bound bipeds, and as if they enjoyed establishing analogies with human beings.

  The blackbird’s whistle has this special quality: it is identical with a human whistle, the effort of someone not terribly skilled at whistling, but with a good reason for whistling, this once, only this once, with no intention of continuing, a person who does it with a determined, but modest and affable tone, calculated to win the indulgence of anyone who hears him.

  After a while the whistle is repeated – by the same blackbird or by its mate – but always as if this were the first time it had occurred to him to whistle; if this is a dialogue, each remark is uttered after long reflection. But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other? And, in whichever case, are these questions and answers (to the whistler or to the mate) or are they confirmations of something that is always the same thing (the bird’s own presence, his belonging to this species, this sex, this territory)? Perhaps the value of this single word lies in its being repeated by another whistling beak, in its not being forgotten during the interval of silence.

  Or else the whole dialogue consists of one saying to the other “I am here,” and the length of the pauses adds to the phrase the sense of a “still,” as if to say: “I am here still, it is still I.” And what if it is in the pause and not in the whistle that the meaning of the message is contained? If it were in the silence that the blackbirds speak to each other? (In this case the whistle would be a punctuation mark, a formula like “over and out.”) A silence, apparently the same as another silence, could express a hundred different notions; a whistle could too, for that matter; to speak to one another by remaining silent, or by whistling, is always possible; the problem is understanding one another. Or perhaps no one can understand anyone: each blackbird believes that he has put into his whistle a meaning fundamental for him, but only he understands it; the other gives him a reply that has no connection with what he said; it is a dialogue between the deaf, a conversation without head or tail.

  But is human dialogue really any different? Mrs Palomar is also in the garden, watering the veronicas. She says, “There they are,” a pleonastic utterance (if it assumes that her husband is already looking at the blackbirds), or else (if he has not seen them) incomprehensible, but in any event intended to establish her own priority in the observation of the blackbirds (because, in fact, she
was the first to discover them and to point out their habits to her husband) and to underline their unfailing appearance, which she has already reported many times.

  “Sssh,” Mr Palomar says, apparently to prevent his wife from frightening them by speaking in a loud voice (useless injunction because the blackbirds, husband and wife, are by now accustomed to the presence and voices of Palomars, husband and wife) but actually to contest the wife’s precedence, displaying a consideration for the blackbirds far greater than hers.

  Then Mrs Palomar says, “It’s dry again, just since yesterday,” meaning the earth in the flowerbed she is watering, a communication in itself superfluous, but meant to show, as she continues speaking and changes the subject, a far greater familiarity and nonchalance with the blackbirds than her husband has. In any case, from these remarks Mr Palomar derives a general picture of tranquility, and he is grateful to his wife for it, because if she confirms the fact that for the moment there is nothing more serious for him to bother about, then he can remain absorbed in his work (or pseudo-work or hyperwork). He allows a minute to pass, then he also tries to send a reassuring message, to inform his wife that his work (or infrawork or ultrawork) is proceeding as usual: to this end he emits a series of sighs and grumbles: “crooked . . . for all that . . . repeat . . . yes, my foot . . .”: utterances that, taken all together, transmit also the message “I am very busy,” in the event that his wife’s last remark contained a veiled reproach on the order of “you could also assume some responsibility for watering the garden.”