Mr Palomar Read online

  From the mute distance of things a sign must come, a summons, a wink: one thing detaches itself from the other things with the intention of signifying something . . . What? Itself, a thing is happy to be looked at by other things only when it is convinced that it signifies itself and nothing else, amid things that signify themselves and nothing else.

  Opportunities of this kind are not frequent, to be sure; but sooner or later they will have to arise: it is enough to wait for one of those lucky coincidences to occur when the world wants to look and be looked at in the same instant and Mr Palomar happens to be going by. Or rather, Mr Palomar does not even have to wait, because these things happen only when you are not awaiting them.

  The universe as mirror

  Mr Palomar suffers greatly because of his difficulty in establishing relations with his fellow-man. He envies those people who have the gift of always finding the right thing to say, the right greeting for everyone, people who are at ease with anyone they happen to encounter and put others at their ease; who move easily among people and immediately understand when they must defend themselves and keep their distance or when they can win trust and affection; who give their best in their relations with others and make others want to give their best; who know at once how to evaluate a person with regard to themselves and on an absolute scale.

  “These gifts,” Palomar thinks with the regret of the man who lacks them, “are granted to those who live in harmony with the world. It is natural for them to establish an accord not only with people but also with things, places, situations, occasions, with the course of the constellations in the firmament, with the association of atoms in molecules. That avalanche of simultaneous events that we call the universe does not overwhelm the lucky individual who can slip through the finest interstices among the infinite combinations, permutations and chains of consequences, avoiding the paths of the murderous meteorites and catching only the beneficent rays. To the man who is the friend of the universe, the universe is a friend. “If only,” Palomar sighs, “I could be like that!”

  He decides to try to imitate such people. All his efforts, from now on, will be directed towards achieving a harmony both with the human race, his neighbor, and with the most distant spiral of the system of the galaxies. To begin with, since his neighbor has too many problems, Palomar will try to improve his relations with the universe. He avoids and reduces to a minimum his association with his similars; he becomes accustomed to making his mind a blank, expelling all indiscreet presences; he observes the sky on starry nights; he reads books on astronomy; he becomes familiar with the notion of sidereal spaces until this becomes a permanent item in his mental furniture. Then he tries to make his thoughts retain simultaneously the nearest things and the farthest: when he lights his pipe he is intent on the flame of the match that at his next puff should allow itself to be drawn to the bottom of the bowl, initiating the slow transformation of shreds of tobacco into embers; but this attention must not make him forget even for a moment the explosion of a supernova taking place in the great Magellanic Cloud at this same instant, that is to say a few million years ago. The idea that everything in the universe is connected and corresponds never leaves him: a variation in the luminosity in the Nebula of Cancer or the condensation of a globular mass in Andromeda cannot help but have some influence on the functioning of his record-player or on the freshness of the watercress leaves in his bowl of salad.

  When he is convinced that he has precisely outlined his own place in the midst of the silent expanse of things floating in the void, amid the dust-cloud of present or possible events that hovers in space and time, Palomar decides the moment has come to apply this cosmic wisdom to relations with his fellows. He hastens to return to society, renews acquaintances, friendships, business associations; he subjects his ties and affections to a careful examination of conscience. He expects to see, extending before him, a human landscape that is finally distinct, clear, without mists, where he will be able to move with precise and confident gestures. Is this what happens? Not at all. He starts by becoming embroiled in a muddle of misunderstandings, hesitations, compromises, failures to act; the most futile matters stir up anguish, the most serious become unimportant; everything he says or does proves clumsy, jarring, irresolute. What is it that does not work?

  This: contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found. In dealing with every person one should know where to place himself with regard to that person, should be sure of the reaction the presence of the other inspires in him – dislike or attraction, dominion or subjugation, discipleship or mastery, performance as actor or as spectator – and on the basis of these and their counter-reactions one should then establish the rules of the game to be applied in their play, the moves and counter-moves to be made. But for all this, even before he starts observing the others, one should know well who he is himself. Knowledge of one’s fellow has this special aspect: it passes necessarily through knowledge of oneself; and this is precisely what Palomar is lacking. Not only knowledge is needed, but also comprehension, agreement with one’s own means and ends and impulses, which is like saying the possibility of exercising a mastery over one’s own inclinations and actions that will control them and direct them but not coerce them or stifle them. The people he admires for the rightness and naturalness of their every word and every action are not only at peace with the universe but, first of all, at peace with themselves. Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge among the galaxies; now he understands that he should have begun by finding an inner peace. The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot.

  The road left open to him is this: he will devote himself from now on to the knowing of himself, he will explore his own inner geography, he will draw the diagram of the moods of his spirit, he will derive from it formulas and theories, he will train his telescope on the orbits traced by the course of his life rather than on those of the constellations. “We can know nothing about what is outside us, if we overlook ourselves,” he thinks now, “the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”

  And thus this new phase of his itinerary in search of wisdom is also achieved. Finally his gaze can rove freely inside himself. What will he see? Will his inner world seem to him an immense, calm rotation of a luminous spiral? Will he see stars and planets navigating in silence on the parabolas and ellipses that determine character and destiny? Will he contemplate a sphere of infinite circumference that has the ego as its center and its center in every point?

  He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.

  Learning to be dead

  Mr Palomar decides that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets along without him. For some while he has realized that things between him and the world are no longer proceeding as they did before; before, they seemed to expect something, one of the other, he and the world, now he no longer recalls what there was to expect, good or bad, or why this expectation kept him in a perpetually agitated, anxious state.

  So now Mr Palomar should feel a sensation of relief, no longer having to wonder what the world has in store for him; and there should be relief also for the world, which no longer has to bother about him. But it is the very expectation of enjoying this calm that makes Mr Palomar anxious.

  In other words, being dead is less easy than it might seem. Fi
rst of all, you must not confuse being dead with not being, a condition that occupies the vast expanse of time before birth, apparently symmetrical with the other, equally vast expanse that follows death. In fact, before birth we are part of the infinite possibilities that may or may not be fulfilled; whereas, once dead, we cannot fulfill ourselves either in the past (to which we now belong entirely but on which we can no longer have any influence) or in the future (which, even if influenced by us, remains forbidden to us). Mr Palomar’s case is really more simple, since his capacity for having an influence on anything or anybody has always been negligible: the world can very well do without him, and he can consider himself dead quite serenely, without even altering his habits. The problem is not the change in what he does but in what he is, or more specifically in what he is as far as the world is concerned. Before, by “world” he meant the world plus himself; now it is a question of himself plus the world minus him.

  Does the world minus him mean an end to anxiety? A world in which things happen independently of his presence and his reactions, following a law of their own or a necessity or rationale that does not involve him? The wave strikes the cliff and hollows out the rock, another wave arrives, another, and still another; whether he is or is not, everything goes on happening. The relief in being dead should be this: having eliminated that patch of uneasiness that is our presence, the only thing that matters is the extension and succession of things under the sun, in their impassive serenity. All is calm or tends towards calm, even hurricanes, earthquakes, the eruption of volcanoes. But was this not the earlier world, when he was in it? When every storm bore within itself the peace of afterwards, prepared the moment when all the waves would have struck the shore, and the wind will have spent its force? Perhaps being dead is passing into the ocean of the waves that remain waves forever, so it is futile to wait for the sea to become calm.

  The gaze of the dead is always a bit deprecatory. Places, situations, occasions are more or less what one already knew, and recognizing them always affords a certain satisfaction; but at the same time many variations, large and small, become noticeable. In and of themselves they could be acceptable, too, if they corresponded to a logical, coherent process; but instead they prove arbitrary and irregular, and this is irksome, especially because one is always tempted to intervene and make the correction that seems necessary, and being dead, one cannot do it. Hence an attitude of reluctance, almost of embarrassment, but at the same time of smugness, the attitude of one who knows that what counts is his own past experience and there is no point in attaching too much importance to all the rest. Then a dominant feeling is quick to arise and impose itself on every thought: it is the relief of knowing that all those problems are other people’s problems, their business. The dead should no longer give a damn about anything because it is not up to them to think about it any more; and even if that may seem immoral, it is in this irresponsibility that the dead find their gaiety.

  The more Mr Palomar’s spiritual condition approaches the one here described, the more the idea of being dead seems natural to him. To be sure, he has not yet found the sublime detachment he thought was usual with the dead, nor a reason that surpasses all explanation, nor an emergence from his own confines like emerging from a tunnel that opens out into other dimensions. At times he has the illusion of being freed at least from the impatience he has felt all his life on seeing others get everything they do wrong and in thinking that in their place he would get it all equally wrong but would at least be aware of his errors. But he is not in the least freed of this impatience, and he realizes that his intolerence of the others’ mistakes and of his own will be perpetuated along with those mistakes, which no death can erase. So he might as well get used to it: for Palomar, being dead means resigning himself to the disappointment in finding himself the same in a definitive state, which he can no longer hope to change.

  Palomar does not underestimate the advantages that the condition of being alive can have over that of being dead: not as regards the future, where risks are always very great and benefits can be of short duration, but in the sense of the possibility of improving the form of one’s own past. (Unless one is already fully satisfied with one’s own past, a situation too uninteresting to make it worth investigating.) A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but rather corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, “How could I have lived without having read it!” and also, “What a pity I did not read it in my youth!” Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

  This is the most difficult step for one who wants to learn how to be dead: convincing himself that his own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which nothing can be added, nor can changes in perspective be introduced in the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who go on living can, according to the changes they experience, introduce changes also in the lives of the dead, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had been vituperated for his actions against the law, celebrating a poet or a prophet in one who had felt himself sentenced to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly for the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he lived it, and no one can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself.

  Therefore Palomar prepares to become a grouchy dead man, reluctant to submit to the sentence to remain exactly as he is; but he is unwilling to give up anything of himself, even if it is a burden.

  Of course, it is also possible to rely on those alternatives that guarantee survival of at least a part of the self in posterity. These views can be divided into two broad categories: the biological mechanism, which allows leaving descendants that part of the self known as the genetic heritage; and the historical mechanism, which grants a continuance in the memory and language of those who go on living and inherit that portion, large or small, of experience that even the most inept man gathers and stores up. These mechanisms can also be seen as a single one, considering the succession of generations like the stages in the life of a single person, which goes on for centuries and millenia; but this is simply a postponement of the problem, from one’s own individual death to the extinction of the human race, however late this may occur.

  Thinking of his own death, Palomar already thinks of that of the last survivors of the human species or of its derivations or heirs. On the terrestrial globe, devastated and deserted, explorers from another planet land; they decipher the clues recorded in the hieroglyphics of the pyramids and in the punched cards of the electronic calculators; the memory of the human race is reborn from its ashes and is spread through the inhabited zones of the universe. And so, after one postponement or another, the moment comes when it is time to wear out and be extinguished in an empty sky, when the last material evidence of the memory of living will degenerate in a flash of heat, or will crystallize its atoms in the chill of an immobile order.

  “If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,” Palomar thinks, “and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.” He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

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  (Series: # )