Moving Parts Read Free Page B

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 thatsubstance 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 autumnafternoon. 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.
    Up until now the narrator has been given no opportunity to speak with someone in authority who would have a better idea where this story is heading; and so the course of events takes him by surprise time after time. Having no binding agreement to rely on, he had wished that three characters would be the end of it, but it was not in his power to insist. And so the figure with the umbrella is crossing a damp terrace covered with dead leaves. It’s still the same November. Somewhere in the corner, garden furniture has been stacked in a soggy pyramid. The torpor of autumn has deprived its forms of lightness. Raindrops tremble on the upturned backs of chairs; the fancy cast-iron legs jut skyward. The season is over, and nothing more will happen; as for the next one, no one knows if it will ever come. The whole property is for sale, and has already been assigned a number in the listings of the real estate agency; the description is accompanied by a photograph in which the succulent green of the trees stands out against a cream-colored facade. Under the heading ‘garden’ is frozen the mute echo of bursts of laughter at a table adorned with red wine stains and lambent patchesof sunlight filtering through the glass tableware. By the gate next to the bell push a metal nameplate of no use to anyone has been put up; never mind what it says. The narrator will ignore the first letter of the surname; he’s already grown tired of the game involving initials. When the key grates in the lock, an empty interior will open wide to reveal white walls and ceilings; a staircase will lend the space depth.