Moving Parts

Looking behind the paragraphs for a path leading beyond what is visible, the narrator has found only confusion. Behind the paragraphs things are the same as everywhere else, only in disarray: broken glass, jumbled sounds. So let’s gaze at the raindrops striking the windowpane — now they are in the foreground. There’s no escape, and it may be necessary until further notice to move amid pieces of scenery set up ahead of time in between which not even the slightest gap can be discerned. Wherever one looks there are walls, floors, and ceilings, earth and sky. Scattered here and there is the sadness of unfulfilled desires and the sadness of desires fulfilled, each equally opaque. There’s always something that a sensitive body wants and something it doesn’t want, and it yields just as easily to euphoria as to despair. Since nothing can be done for it, at the very least it avoids protruding edges and is cautious when handling knives. The defenseless skin solicitously conceals some secret truth: a greedy stomach, delicate intestines, a few liters of blood that can be discharged in the blink of an eye, spilling beyond recall — and above all, the incessantly beating heart, which may never know peace till it bursts. In such conditions the charming little flowers on the meadows of bedding fabrics lend the pillow an ironic quality. But the body, trustful and yearning for sleep, is unaware of this. As for the white batiste that simply cries out for lace, it only seems not to impose its own essence on bedrooms: Whiteness is at root a provocation, and lace impresses with an ephemeral innocence about which it can be said merely that sooner or later it may be soiled, and it’s easy to imagine pillows trampled by heavy boots, lying in mud, perhaps stained with blood. But the body refuses to hear anything about this. Nor does it wish to know about the blindness of bullets, nor the cold gleam of a steel barrel, nor the plump worms that live somewhere down in the earth.

One might now expect a question asking who this narrator in fact is, unabashedly permitting himself conclusions of this kind. Whether he also has a body to bear, whether he has feelings and desires, and what gender he is. The attempt to determine gender in particular is always reasonable. Here there are only two possibilities for defining all beings, with or without a body. The narrator is a man; he cannot be anything else. This is imposed by grammatical forms, especially those of the verb, though of course they are not the only things that follow so naturally after the word ‘narrator’ — pronouns should also be mentioned. Their testimony is consistent, and therefore irrefutable. It’s not enough to say that they reveal the truth, since in fact they create it. The narrator knows that grammatical forms submit to his will only reluctantly, to a degree limited by their own routine way of manifesting themselves; moreover he can never be certain that it isn’t they who are making use of him. The scrap of existence that fell to his lot should not exclude the possibility of experiencing feelings, though these kinds of feelings don’t have to be — and why should they? — the slightest bit nobler than is generally accepted. All he can do is remain to the end hidden behind the screen of the third-person style, which protects his feelings from idle curiosity arising from boredom. The passing moments stir emotions in him like a current of water stirring a muddy riverbed. They leave behind a turbid deposit, a trace of longing. It is promise and hope that turn into longing, a sign that the moment has already gone — weightless, incorporeal, possible only as a parting without farewell. White tablecloths, the aroma of coffee, a stray shaft of sunlight in a glass of beer bring temporary consolation, but they cannot assuage the longing.