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Watching the others go to prison, or to Algeria to fight for colonial France, Bruno had a revelation that he could change course, that his own commitment to mayhem was not inevitable, not total. He stopped thieving. He gave up drinking. He got a job punching tickets in the metro, rented a maid’s room out in the nineteenth. He made plans to enroll in school. He was still a teenager. Guy Debord shunned him, and the others followed suit. Working, enrolling in school, these things were just not done. You were meant to reject society completely, to fling yourself headlong into a world without the old structures.
Bruno punched tickets in the metro by day, and by night, he took up reading. At the age of twenty, he left Paris to study earth science in Lyon.
“We always felt like there was something to honor in the clandestine nature of our communications with him but it’s wearing off.”
There was a time, he said, when a communiqué from Lacombe would come through and they’d all gather around the printer like supplicants, to read these emails full of outré declarations about cave bears and cavemen. But that time had passed.
“My position, and Pascal knows this, it’s not anything I’ve kept hidden, is that you can’t go back. To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”
I asked how so. It was fine to be curious. I was curious.
“A caveman isn’t rejecting what’s around him. That’s for intellectuals, people who have overthought everything. You have to deal with life as it is. This guy is talking about half a million years ago, but he’s writing about it on a computer. He’s a crudivore, renouncing the cooked, while people have been eating cooked food forever, and he’s renounced agriculture, which the people in this area have been practicing for twelve thousand years.”
Two teenage girls passed by, long-limbed and golden, in very short shorts, and the Serb turned to watch them. One of the girls caught his eye, and nudged the other. The two girls stopped walking and consorted. Anyone new, anyone in a suit, was someone to flirt with.
[...]
The Serb, with native fluency in Jailbait, was chatting up the girls. He was focused on them as if his primary duty was not to guard the subminister but to get into the pants of one of the girls (while no doubt using his security credentials to loosen them both up). The Serb’s heavy brow was less severe, I noticed, now that he was grinning.
lol
[...] in his essay The Last Reader, Ricardo Piglia writes that "Borges's greatest lesson is perhaps the certainty that fiction doesn't only depend on the person who constructs it but also on the person who reads it." And he adds: "What is particular to Borges (if such a thing exists), is the capacity to read everything like a fiction and believe in its power. Fiction as a theory of reading."
<3
[...] What makes Macedonio's story remarkable is how earnestly he wrestles with tigers that we all face. It isn't the felicity of his prose, or the prescience of his ideas -- though his prose is often felicitous and his ideas often prescient. Rather, it's the open heart with which he takes up his pen and seeks, through its wanderings, to find a way to love the sound of the kettle on the stove, the crumbled mate leaves on the tablecloth, the arrangement of the furniture in the room -- all the dull, pedestrian details of everyday life that clearly offer more irritation than fascination. And somewhere in these details, the tiny tinkerings that he inexhaustibly and minutely calibrates in every corner of his life, is the beloved. ANd in the beloved, in the other, there is passion, and death, and art, and eternity.
[...] Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression. [...]
I recall you within a chance patch of sunlight. You had sharp elbows and pale, dusty-looking eyes. When you spoke, you would carve the air with the riblike edge of your little hand and the glint of a bracelet on your thin wrist. Your hair would melt as it merged with the sunlit air that quivered around it. You smoked copiously and nervously. You exhaled through both nostrils, obliquely flicking off the ash. Your dove-gray manor was five versts from ours. Its interior was reverberant, sumptuous, and cool. A photograph of it had appeared in a glossy metropolitan magazine. Almost every morning, I would leap onto the leather wedge of my bicycle and rustle along the path, through the woods, then along the highway and through the village, then along another path toward you. You counted on your husband’s not coming in September. And we feared nothing, you and I—not your servants’ gossip, not my family’s suspicions. Each of us, in a different way, trusted fate.
In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.
When we had left the village, crossed the bridge, and were climbing the path toward your house, I took you under the elbow, and you flashed that special sidelong smile that told me you were happy. Suddenly I had the desire to tell you about Pal Palych’s little wrinkles, about the spangled St. Isaac’s, but, as soon as I began, I had a feeling the wrong words were coming out, bizarre words, and when you tenderly said, “Decadent,” I changed the subject. I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words. Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious.
I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them—the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. “You know what I’ve decided? Listen. I cannot live without you. That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’ll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could …”
I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.
What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.
An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.