Little by little you will manage to understand something more about the origins of the translator's machinations: the secret spring that set them in motion was his jealousy of the invisible rival who came constantly between him and Ludmilla, the silent voice that speaks to her through books, this ghost with a thousand faces and faceless, all the more elusive since for Ludmilla authors are never incarnated in individuals of flesh and blood, they exist for her only in published pages, the living and the dead both are there always ready to communicate with her, to amaze her, and Ludmilla is always ready to follow them, in the fickle, carefree relations one can have with incorporeal persons. How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words? Always, since his taste and talent impelled him in that direction, but more than ever since his relationship with Ludmilla became critical, Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. If this idea had succeeded in imposing itself, if a systematic uncertainty as to the identity of the writer had kept the reader from abandoning himself with trust—trust not so much in what was being told him as in the silent narrating voice—perhaps externally the edifice of literature would not have changed at all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever. Then Ermes Marana would no longer have felt himself abandoned by Ludmilla absorbed in her reading: between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.

[...] I have realized that only by multiplying myself, multiplying my person, my presence, my exits from the house, and my returns, in short the opportunities for an ambush, could I make my falling into enemy hands more improbable. So I then ordered five Mercedes sedans exactly like mine, which enter and leave the armored gate of my villa at all hours, escorted by the motorcyclists of my bodyguard, and bearing inside a shadow, bundled up, dressed in black, who could be me or an ordinary stand-in. The companies of which I am president consist of initials with nothing behind them and some headquarters in interchangeable empty rooms; therefore my business meetings can be held at constantly varying addresses which for greater safety I order changed at the last minute each time. More delicate problems stem from my extramarital relationship with a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée, Lorna by name, to whom I devote two and sometimes three weekly sessions of two and three-quarters hours. To protect Lorna the only thing to do was to make it impossible to locate her, and the system to which I have resorted is that of parading a multiplicity of simultaneous amorous encounters, so that it is impossible to understand which are my counterfeit mistresses and which is the real one. Every day both I and my doubles visit, on constantly changing schedules, pied-à-terres scattered all over the city and inhabited by attractive women. This network of false mistresses allows me to conceal my true meetings with Lorna also from my wife, Elfrida, to whom I have presented this extravaganza as a security measure. [...]

How many years has it been since I could allow myself some disinterested reading? How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself? I turn and see the desk waiting for me, the typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it, the chapter to begin. Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me. What I do has as its aim the spiritual state of this woman in the deck chair framed by the lens of my spyglass, and it is a condition forbidden me.

He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions. I feel I can share many of his affirmations, but I was careful not to let him know this. He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath. And since for him artifice is the true substance of everything, the author who devised a perfect system of artifices would succeed in identifying himself with the whole.

Strange people circulate in this valley: literary agents awaiting my new novel, for which they have already collected advances from publishers all over the world; advertising agents who want my characters to wear certain articles of clothing and drink certain fruit juices; electronic technicians who insist on finishing my unfinished novels with a computer. I try to go out as little as possible; I avoid the village; if I want to take a walk, I choose the mountain trails.

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact— for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes prove unrecognizable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

I tried to say this to her. She retorted, a bit irritated: "Why? Would you want me to read in your books only what you're convinced of?"

I answered her: "That isn't it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn't know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn't know."

(Luckily I can watch with my spyglass that other woman reading and convince myself that not all readers are like this Lotaria. )

Passing again beneath the ginkgo, I said to Mr. Okeda that in the contemplation of the shower of leaves the fundamental thing was not so much the perception of each of the leaves as of the distance between one leaf and another, the empty air that separated them. What I seemed to have understood was this: an absence of sensations over a broad part of the perceptive field is the condition necessary for our sensitivity to concentrate locally and temporally, just as in music a basic silence is necessary so that the notes will stand out against it.

"For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, "reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say. As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood. [...]"