Moving Parts

The narrator could assert that he saw with his own eyes the events that took place in the hotel lobby, and likewise the arrival of the cab. He watched them through the glass panes, over a beer, which at his request had been brought to him in the dining room, even though the tables were already being cleared after breakfast. But how was it with the interior of that room on some floor or other? This is a critical question, assuming the world actually exists, and does so reliably enough that we should not consider ourselves entitled to discuss uncertainties. And could the narrator drink his beer if the world didn’t exist? But in fact he didn’t drink it at all. He merely watched the foam settling in the mug.

There now reappears the question of the rolls that the other two spread with butter not so long ago: it would be nice to know for certain that they at least actually existed. The narrator smirks when the word actually moves full sail into the dangerous straits that have emerged between the image of the rolls and the period. In order to eat the rolls one must have a body — it’s as simple as that. Body and rolls are of the same substance. There’s no need whatsoever to concern oneself with what that substance is; it’s enough that there is someone to name the one and the other — and thus the narrator pulls out of his ear an egg that he had only just put in his pocket, and takes a bow. The body is indifferent to this entire matter. Naive and simple-hearted, it wants only to experience good; it desires nothing but comforts and pleasures, and that is why sofas sink so softly and caressingly beneath its weight, and why cream is served with coffee. On the other hand, that which is called life demands impossible positions of the body. It requires monkeylike agility for climbing masts; it requires crawling on one’s knees with a scrubbing brush across the planks of the deck, in gleaming white dress shirts, in jackets on which there is not to be a single speck of dust, nor drop of brine. What torture it is to sail day after day in the fog of the present tense. Subjects and predicates welter in it devoid of outlines, drifting without goal or direction. Until they are stopped by a period at the end of a sentence, everything still seems possible; every unexpected “therefore” opens the sluice gates to seas of subordinate clauses, to narrows of ironic meanings, to foreign ports of perverse conclusions in which the last word casts doubt on the first, like a customs official boarding a ship at the end of its voyage and looking for any pretext to question the bills of lading and discreetly pocket a wad of crumpled banknotes. The fog lights of adverbs and complements summon one fragment after another from the hazy background; let’s look for instance at a bright smudge of red moving through the grayness of an autumn afternoon. It’s a red umbrella, which a fourth character is just about to fold with a snap. The narrator hopes that at this point he’ll finally be able to put his foot on the dry land of the past tense, in the kingdom of certainty where facts live and flourish. Only there do they flourish, nowhere else; the past tense is their entire world, the homeland of truths that are incontrovertible though, it must be admitted, usually contradictory.