The Book of All Loves, page 10
The writer shook her head – no, he did not need to show her the phone – and turned to look down at a mass of clouds that were partially occluding the red brilliance of the rising sun. In her mind’s eye she saw the image of a Berber, many years before, at the foot of Mount Toubkal, throwing a photo of himself into the fire.
‘But anyway,’ said the man, now compulsively sipping at his fourth mini bottle of water, ‘what I really wanted to tell you about is the morning I got back from the Archaeological Museum, when I couldn’t stop thinking about the great eye that had been saved among the other images on my mobile phone, and sitting on the terrace of my apartment looking out to sea – far off but very much still visible beyond the domes of St Mark’s – I drank my vermouth and a memory came to me of something related to that sea and to a different eye, an eye from my childhood, which was a stone that dropped slowly, calmly into the depths after I threw it into the sea as a child – to explain: up to the age of eleven, the narrow, winding canals of the city had been the only navigable water I’d been on, but then I went out on the open sea one day, it was a Sunday picnic in a small sailboat with a school friend and his parents. I had a stone with me that I’d found in the street on the way to the jetty, it had come off the façade of a house, and I’d tucked it away in my bag, between bathing suit and towel, a chunk of marble that had called out to me as soon as I laid eyes on it because it was clearly part of a sculpture, since an eye had been sculpted into one side of it, one of those eyes without pupils, those milky eyes old statues often have, a left eye, to be specific, but I also liked the fact this left eye was the same size as my own left eye, and I remember instinctively glancing up and seeing a statue on the façade of the building that was indeed missing not only the left eye, but also the right, which seemed odd to me, and I put my left eye in my bag and continued on my way, and then, hours later, out in the boat, the weather quite lovely, the water virtually a millpond, everything as pleasant and agreeable as one would expect of such a Sunday in summer, but all of a sudden I had a feeling of the boat as some kind of shabby floating shack, unbearably crowded, suddenly the social prestige of nautical activities made no sense to me and I decided to do something vulgar, something that would in some way violate the tacit expectations of a genteel picnic on the water, so in a few brief seconds I came up with a plan, which consisted of taking the eye out of my bag, showing it to everyone and then throwing it over the side, exactly that, an eye from the 17th century about to be thrown into the depths for no particular reason, merely for the pleasure of scuppering the history of art, and, with everybody looking incredulously on, to show them that the age and the aura of the things we think valuable mean nothing at all, and thereby to experience the priceless moment of holding between my hands something that represented all the artistic prestige patiently built up over human centuries and instantly transforming it into a run-of-the-mill stone that, indistinguishable from any other stone, would lie at the bottom of the ocean for centuries – for earthly centuries – and, ultimately, a statue’s eye that was my eye – because for me, in that moment, the stone eye was really my own eye – and that would be condemned to seeing nothing ever again except the total, deep-sea darkness, but then when I had it in my hand and was just about to show it to everyone, the true vulgarity of my plan suddenly struck me, like the power I’d be exercising would be purely make-believe, the sort of childish nonsense that was beneath an intelligent young man like me, and I suddenly changed my mind, I decided I’d still throw the eye in the sea, but secretly, without anyone seeing, just to take pleasure in violating the heritage of history in such a way that only I would remember, a violence that not only would be impossible therefore to demonstrate but that, for example, if I wanted to show off in later years about having thrown a 17th-century relic into the sea, I’d be unable to, having no proof, which would leave my act of vandalism in a kind of limbo, a void, a futile cry in the middle of a no less futile desert, and it was then that, while everyone else was eating at the stern, I went over to the prow and dropped it in, nobody was there to see but I still did it, I assure you, I dropped that eye into the sea, I know I can’t prove it, I know that with neither witnesses nor photographic documentation I’m just a hostage to my twisted, secret deed, but I dropped it in, and it didn’t make a sound when it hit the water, and if it did, the sound was cancelled out by the noise of the millions of waves all around, so that that piece of 17th-century culture sank in complete silence, but suddenly, far from a sense of satisfaction, I was hit by a feeling of panic, an overwhelming panic, gripped by a certainty that condemning this eye to the eternal, deep-sea darkness would mean also generating a process of darkness throughout all of Venice, a certainty that in the exact moment when this eye stolen from the city came to land on the seabed, the eyes of every single Venetian would start to be affected by the same total darkness as that stone eye, and who was to say whether or not that in turn would affect all their other bodily senses, and a little later that day out on the water a storm moved in, it wasn’t bad enough to endanger us as we sailed back but it did leave us shaken, like cans of fizzy drink it left us, and I threw up, I had to clean up the mess myself, had to be sure I left the deck spotless, but that was the last thing on my mind, really, because I simply couldn’t stop thinking about my eye on its slow but irremediable descent into the deep, and for many years I couldn’t sleep for thinking of my stone eye, I saw it as it plummeted and went on plummeting, spinning around on itself, solitary, milky, pupil-less, a marble periscope that only wanted to be able to see, that yearned to have knowledge of the world – as though naïvely thinking it was on its way to meet its counterpart, the other lost eye – and yet was completely sightless, and I thought then that when it hit the bottom there would be a tremendous crash accompanied by a quick, sharp cracking sound inside my head, and that my body would quake like a drum, and I saw this as the beginning of the irremediable darkness for the inhabitants of the city… Are you still with me, friend?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m with you.’
‘Wait, I need water,’ he said as he opened the final bottle.
‘No problem, take as long as you need.’
As the man drank, she looked out at the sky, blue and totally cloudless in that moment, and remembered months before, in Venice, her husband saying that, as with vinyl records, the world’s objects all had surfaces marked by grooves and micro-grooves, and you just had to find the right needle to extract their story, their particular and previously unheard story – and she thought that she was perhaps the needle now, the instrument this ambassador had chosen to use to extract these stories from himself, and that everybody at some point in their life played the involuntary role of being somebody else’s needle. Now, wiping some drops of water from his chin, the man put the lid back on the bottle and continued: ‘Okay, well I must tell you that this was how it happened, exactly this happened, I’ll tell you: when, a few months ago, after getting back from the Archaeological Museum, I was drinking my vermouth and I remembered the eye that I’d dropped in the sea, not wanting to spend any more time thinking about all of this, I decided to head out again for some air, to be among people, eat out, so I went to a restaurant, one by the Ponte dell’Accademia where they serve traditional Venetian fare, a place I’ve become a regular at, and which I referred to before, the only one in the world that has mineral water from the mountains of Toubkal, I don’t know how they manage to import it, I’ve asked them a hundred times and more but they don’t want to tell me, but those of us who have tried the water at the foot of the mountain have only to smell it and we know, a flavour that’s unlike anything, I sometimes joke to myself that this water is Alexandra’s last dream – that protectress of humanity who lies beneath the ice at the summit of Mount Toubkal – a leopardess’s last dream made real, and so I took a seat by the window, a spot with a good view of the moorings, I love seeing the succession of knots on all the posts, all of them the same but also different, and I ordered a pizza with large amounts of cheese on it, The Cheesiest Pizza In All Of Venice, as it says on a sign behind the counter, and they soon brought the pizza, but before I started it I poured myself the water, I was dying of thirst, and I took a drink, a very long drink, but something very unusual then happened, I immediately heard a noise inside myself, a noise that flooded my body completely and made me tremble like a kettledrum, the entire world resonating inside me, and I closed my eyes, I screwed them up tight, and I knew then that the stone eye was, in that precise moment, at the end of its descent to the bottom of the sea, after all those years, the eye had finally reached the bottom, an impact that produced an unbearable, rumbling crash all that distance away in the deep-sea darkness and that only I could hear. Two marble eyes that must have been sharing a vision, now separated forever. The beginning of the city’s slow but indubitable blindness, the irreversible withdrawal of love.’ The man paused for a moment, took a breath, before adding: ‘But something else happened, something that concerns you directly, and this is the point I’ve been wanting to get to. After drinking the water and feeling my body tremble in that way, I immediately opened my eyes and looked towards the tables at the back of the trattoria, and there you were, sitting with your husband, the two of you eating pizza and you asking him what “lightning” was in Latin. I realized I’d seen you before somewhere, many years before; your fossil dimension began to reveal itself before my eyes with an unstoppable force. You then took a drink of your water, and you shook, your body shook. That was all I needed to see; I knew then that you were the chosen ones. Your husband would soon begin having the same dreams as I do. You would soon be wearing this blouse. Soon, all that’s happening now would begin.’
The writer looked him in the eyes and said: ‘Chosen to do what?’
To which he instantly replied: ‘To build a new world, a world where love will be restored.’
She gave a laugh, which seemed to have no effect on the man, who pointed to the travel bag between her feet and said, ‘That snowglobe of Venice is going to break, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it.’ She instantly stopped laughing. ‘How do you know what’s in my bag?’ ‘I’ve told you, I’m the ambassador, I know everything.’
She took a breath after the man’s infinite speech – he had just stood up, saying, ‘I think I’ve drunk too much water,’ before going down the aisle towards the toilets in the rear. As she waited for him to come back, her hands instinctively reached down to shield the travel bag. She looked out the window and thought of them flying over a double abyss, that of the sky and that of the ocean, bathed now in morning sunlight. And then she started to feel troubled, because it had been more than 20 minutes and the man still wasn’t back from the toilet. At that point she did not know that he would never be coming back.
III.
Millions of years ago – so long that love did not yet exist – there was no oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere; it was found only in the oceans, produced by a network of single-cell aquatic organisms. But there was also iron in that water, which, when it came into contact with the oxygen, inevitably oxidized, creating a dark, ferruginous layer that eventually covered the entire seabed. Over time, and after all the water had evaporated, the oxide layer was left exposed, and rains came and another ocean replaced the previous one and the oxidization process began once more, repeating and repeating thousands of times over. In the land around Canberra, towering cliffs can be seen with the strata of these dark layers of oxide – once oxygen – on show. Layers that could be said to be the Earth respiring. (Oxide love)
Our language, this language that only you and I speak and that nobody has spoken before and that nobody will ever speak again because it’s ours and ours alone, is invented every day with one single aim, to weld together the hemispheres of our souls.
– she says.
And Creation’s first visible animal appears.
– he says.
There was a lightning bolt in the night, a regular lightning bolt, nothing remarkable about it. But in the same moment, beyond the horizon, there was another lightning bolt, and this one left the shadow of the first engraved on the wall of the house, a shadow so dark and branching that those who saw it took it for a climbing plant. As though the second lightning bolt had X-rayed the first onto the wall. Or indeed, turned it to cinders. (Double-flame love)
Fortune-tellers and clairvoyants see only at a distance: they see into the place where everything is diffused in time and space and nothing matters any more, which is why their predictions about the distant future are always correct. But they can’t see what’s going to happen in the very next moment.
– she says.
Whereas you saw me.
– he says, finishing a bundle of some firewood that, before long, would be a fire.
Nothing exists until it has been named. Every epoch establishes its own concept of things, and our concept of love and the way we feel and express it has come down to us from the Middle Ages; something called ‘courtly love’. It consists of projecting love in the absence of the feminine figure, a woman placed at such a distance that she can firstly be invoked by the written word, then verbally seduced and finally, following a winding path of programmatic misunderstandings, offer herself up to be penetrated in the carnal encounter. We repeat the same clichés as a 13th-century man or a 19th-century woman. Nietzsche said that even the most commonly used words are metaphors for other things, but are so well-worn that we have forgotten that fact. The same happens with love; repeated ad infinitum, every time it appears we think it to be absolutely original. Here is a first paradox: to love consists in choosing someone from among the millions of people on the planet, segregating that person in order to ascribe virtues to them that only you can see, contemplating a marvel where the rest of the planet sees only statistics and ordinariness, creating a unique human, but only then to apply that courtly love template to them, which in turn standardizes the beloved. Or at least this was still the case until recently. The kinds of negotiations required by friendships and love on social networks arise out of a skill set barely different from that required by a company to maintain and increase its profits. In that classical equation of courtly love, this is the result of exchanging the violence of the courtier for capitalist surplus value. Moving, that is, from a love of what is absolutely absent – that of the courtly Homo amoris – to a love of what is absolutely present – that of the capitalist Homo economicus. (Economicus love)
So many years together and at the same time so many years getting to know one another, so many years getting to know one another and at the same time so many years loving one another, so many years loving one another and at the same time so many years in happy isolation, and we have achieved none of what we wanted.
