A Breath of Life Read online

  I live in the living flesh, that’s why I make such an effort to give thick skin to my characters. But I can’t stand it and make them cry for no reason.

  Self-moving roots that are not planted or the root of a tooth? For I too cast off my chains: I kill what disturbs me and good and evil disturb me and I head definitively to encounter a world that is inside me, I who write to free myself from the difficult burden of a person being himself.

  In every word a heart beats. Writing is that search for the intimate truth of life. Life that disturbs me and leaves my own trembling heart suffering the incalculable pain that seems necessary for my maturity — maturity? I’ve lived this long without it!

  Yes. But it seems the time has come to fully accept the mysterious life of those who one day shall die. I must begin by accepting myself and not feeling the punitive horror of every time I fall, for when I fall the human race inside me falls too. To accept myself fully? that is a violation of my very life. Every change, every new project is scary: my heart is scared. And that is why each word of mine has a heart where blood flows.

  Everything I’m writing here is forged in my silence and in shadows. I see little, I hear almost nothing. I finally dive into myself down to the birthplace of the spirit that inhabits me. My source is obscure. I’m writing because I don’t know what to do with myself. I mean: I don’t know what to do with my spirit. The body tells a lot. But I don’t know the laws of the spirit: it wanders. My thought, with the enunciation of the words mentally blossoming, without my saying or writing anything afterwards — this thought of mine in words is preceded by an instantaneous vision, without words, of the thought — the word that follows, almost immediately — a spatial difference of less than a millimeter. Before thinking, then, I’ve already thought. I suppose that the composer of a symphony only has the “thought before the thought,” is what can be seen in this very quick mute idea little more than an atmosphere? No. It’s actually an atmosphere that, already colored with the symbol, lets me sense the air of the atmosphere from which everything comes. The pre-thought is in black and white. The thought with words has other colors. The pre-thought is the pre-instant. The pre-thought is the immediate past of the instant. Thinking is the concretization, materialization of what was pre-thought. Really pre-thinking is what guides us, since it’s intimately linked to my mute unconsciousness. The pre-thought is not rational. It’s almost virginal.

  Sometimes the feeling of pre-thinking is agonizing: it’s the tortuous creation that thrashes in the shadows and is only freed after thinking — with words.

  You demand from me a tremendous effort of writing; please, I beg your pardon, my dear, allow me to pass by. I am a serious and honest man and if I don’t tell the truth it’s because the truth is forbidden. I don’t put what’s forbidden to use but I free it. Things obey the vital breath. We are born to enjoy. And enjoying is already being born. When we were fetuses we enjoyed the total comfort of the maternal womb. As for me, I know nothing. What I have enters me through my skin and makes me act sensually. I want the truth which is only given to me though its opposite, through its untruth. And I can’t stand everyday life. That must be why I write. My life is one single day. And that’s how the past for me is present and future. All in a single dizziness. And the sweetness is such that it causes an unbearable itch in the soul. Living is magical and wholly inexplicable. I understand death better. Being everyday is an addiction. What am I? I’m a thought. Do I have the breath within me? do I? but who does? who speaks for me? do I have a body and a spirit? am I an I? “That’s exactly right, you are an I,” the world answers me terribly. And I am horrified. God must never be thought because either He flees or I do. God must be ignored and felt. Then He acts. I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error.

  The result of all this is that I’ll have to create a character — more or less as novelists do, and through this character understand. Because I cannot do it alone: solitude, the same that exists in every one, makes me invent. And is there another way to be saved? besides creating one’s own realities? I have the strength for this like anybody else — isn’t it true that we ended up creating a fragile and mad reality that is civilization? this civilization guided only by dreams. Every invention of mine sounds to me like a layman’s prayer — such is the intensity of feeling, I write to learn. I chose myself and my character — Angela Pralini — so that perhaps through us I might understand that lack of definition of life. Life has no adjective. It’s a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me in the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now.

  I wanted to initiate an experiment and not just be the victim of an experiment I never authorized, that merely happened. That’s why I’m inventing a character. I also want to shatter, not just the enigma of the character, the enigma of things.

  This I suppose will be a book made apparently out of shards of a book. But in fact it is about portraying quick flashes of mine and quick flashes of my character Angela. I could grab onto every flash and go on about it page after page. But it so happens that the essence of the thing is often in the flash. Each entry in my diary and in the diary I made Angela write, scares me a little. Each entry is written in the present. The instant is already made of fragments. I don’t want to give a false future to each flash of an instant. Everything happens exactly at the moment in which it’s being written or read. This passage here was actually written in relation to its basic form after I reread the book because as the book progressed I didn’t have a clear understanding as to which way to go. Yet, without giving greater logical explanations, I clung entirely to the fragmentary aspect in Angela as in myself.

  My life is made of fragments and that’s how it is with Angela. My own life has an actual plot. It would be the history of the bark of a tree and not of the tree. A bunch of facts that only the senses would explain. I see that, without meaning to, what I write and what Angela writes are passages that might be called random, though within a context of . . .

  That’s how the book occurs to me this time. And, since I respect what comes from me to myself, that’s exactly how I write.

  What is written here, mine or Angela’s, are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me. These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins.

  I know that this book isn’t easy, but it’s easy only for those who believe in the mystery. As I write it I do not know myself, I forget myself. The I who appears in this book is not I. It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves. I took from this book only what I wanted — I left out my story and Angela’s. What matters to me are the snapshots of sensations — sensations that are thought and not the immobile pose of those waiting for me to say, “say cheese!” Because I’m no street photographer.

  I’ve already read this book through to the end and I’m adding to this beginning something for you to keep in mind. It’s that the end, which shouldn’t be read beforehand, comes back to the beginning in a circle, a snake swallowing its own tail. And, having read the book, I cut much more than half of it, I only left what provokes and inspires me for life: a star lit at dusk.

  Do not read what I write as a reader would do. Unless this reader works, he too, on the soliloquies of the irrational dark.

  If this book ever comes out, may the profane recoil from it. Since writing is something sacred where no infidel can enter. I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to “like.” But a small group will see that this “liking” is superficial and will enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither “bad” nor “good.”

  Inspiration is like a mysterio
us scent of amber. I have a small piece of amber with me. The scent makes me sister to the sacred orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Blessed be your loves. Could it be that I am afraid to take the step of dying at this very instant? Careful not to die. Yet I am already in the future. This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well. That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

  The Daydream Is What Reality Is

  ANGELA

  The last word will be the fourth dimension.

  Length: her speaking

  Width: beyond thought

  Depth: my speaking of her, of facts and feelings and of her beyond-thought.

  I must be legible almost in the dark.

  I had a vivid and inexplicable dream: I dreamed I was playing with my reflection. But my reflection wasn’t in a mirror, but reflected somebody else who wasn’t me.

  Was it because of this dream that I invented Angela as my reflection? Everything is real but moves lei-sure-ly in slow motion. Or it jumps from one theme to another, disconnected. If I uproot myself I expose my roots to wind and rain. Brittle. And not like blue granite and the stone of Iansã without cracks or fissures. Angela for now has a swathe of fabric over her face that hides her identity.

  As she speaks she begins removing this swathe — until her face is naked. Her face speaks unpolished and expressive. Before unmasking her I shall cleanse the air with rain and prepare the soil for plowing.

  I will avoid sinking into the whirlpool of her river of liquid gold glimmering with emeralds. Her mud is reddish. Angela is a statue that cries out and flutters around the canopy of the trees. Her world is only as unreal as the life of anyone who happens to read me. I raise high the lantern so she can glimpse the road that is a wrong turn. Stupefied and with uninhibited joy I watch her rise with a ruffling of wings.

  To create her I must plow the land. Is there some breakdown in the computer system of my ship while it crosses spaces in search of a woman? a computer made of pure silicon, with the equivalent of thousands of microscopic transistors fixed to its polished and gleaming surface with the noonday sun beating down in a mirror, Angela is a mirror.

  I want her to be the means by which the highest axioms of mathematics are solved within a fraction of a second. I want to calculate through her the answer to seven times the square root of 15 to the third power. (The exact figure is 406.663325.)

  Angela’s brain is embedded in a protective layer of plastic that makes it practically indestructible — after I die Angela will keep vibrating. A statue always being relocated by the crazed disturbing buzz of three thousand golden bees. An angel carried by blue butterflies? An angel isn’t born and doesn’t die. An angel is a spiritual state. I sculpted her with twisted roots. It’s only out of impudence that Angela exists in me. As for me I reduce everything to a tumult of words.

  We are all sentenced to death. While I write I might die. One day I shall die amidst random facts.

  — It was God who invented me and gave His breath to me and I became a living being. And so it is that I present to myself a person. And therefore I think that I am sufficiently born to try to express myself even if with rough words. It’s my interior that speaks and sometimes without connection to my conscious mind. I speak as though someone were speaking for me. Perhaps the reader speaks for me?

  I do not remember my previous life, since I have the result which is today. But I remember tomorrow.

  How shall I begin?

  I’m so frightened that the way to enter this writing has to be suddenly, without warning. Writing is without warning. So I start with the instant like someone throwing himself into suicide: the instant is all of a sudden. And so it is that I’ve all of a sudden arrived in the middle of a celebration. I’m flustered and apprehensive: it’s not easy to deal with Angela, the woman I invented because I needed a facsimile of dialogue. An accursed celebration? No, the celebration of a man who wishes to share with you, Angela, something that absorbs me completely.

  Angela Pralini is the celebration of birth. I don’t know what to expect from her: will I just have to transcribe her? I must be patient so as not to lose myself within me: I live losing sight of myself. I need patience because I am many paths, including the fatal dead-end alley. I am a man who chose the great silence. Creating a being who stands in opposition to me is within the silence. A spiraling clarinet. A dark cello. But I manage to see, however dimly, Angela standing beside me. Here she is coming a little closer. Then she sits by my side, rests her face in her hands and weeps for having been created. I console her making her understand that I too feel the vast and shapeless melancholy of having been created. I’d rather have stayed in the immanescence of the sacred Nothing. But there is a wisdom of nature that caused me, after being created, to move about even though I didn’t know what my legs were for. Angela, I too made my home in a strange nest and I too obey the obstinacy of life. My life wants me to be a writer and so I write. It’s not by choice: it’s an intimate command.

  And just as I received the breath of life that made me a man, I breathe into you who become a soul. I introduce you to myself, visualizing you in snapshots that already happen in the midst of your inauguration: you don’t start at the beginning, you start in the middle, you begin with the instant today.

  The day begins. The day is a crusher of paving-stones for the street that I hear in my room. I wanted in my way of nailing you down for myself for nothing to have modifications or definitions: everything would move in a circular motion.

  Sometimes I feel that Angela is electronic. Is she a high-precision machine or a test-tube baby? Is she made of screws and springs? Or is she the living half of me? Angela is more than I myself. Angela doesn’t know she’s a character. Besides I too might be the character of myself. Could it be Angela feels that she’s a character? Because, as for me, I sometimes feel that I am someone’s character. It’s uncomfortable being two: me for me and me for others. I live in my hermitage which I only leave to exist in myself: Angela Pralini. Angela is my necessity. But I still don’t know why Angela lives in a kind of constant prayer. A pagan prayer. Ever-new excommunicated terrors. She’s achieved a native language.

  Angela doesn’t know herself, and she has no clear image of herself. There is a disconnection in her. She confuses in herself the “for-me” with the “from-me”! If she weren’t so dumbstruck and paralyzed by her own existence, she would also see herself from the outside in — and would discover that she is a voracious person: she eats with an intemperance bordering on complete greed as if bread were being taken from her very mouth. But she believes she’s merely dainty.

  I’m sculpting Angela with stones from the hillsides, until I shape her into a statue. Then I breathe into her and she becomes animated and surpasses me.

  You must not forget that I am basically different from Angela. Aside from everything else, the man I am, he tries anxiously in vain to follow the byzantine meanderings of a woman, with attics and corners and angles and living flesh — and suddenly spontaneous as a flower. I as a writer cast seeds. Angela Pralini was born of an ancient seed that I cast upon the hard soil millennia ago. To arrive at me were millennia upon the earth necessary?

  How far do I go and where do I already start to be Angela? Are we fruit of the same tree? No — Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? she’s the waves of the sea. While I’m the dense and gloomy forest. I’m in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation, being an emanation of mine, she is I. I, the author: the unknown. It’s by mere coincidence that I am I. Angela seems like something intimate that became exteriorized. Angela is not
a “character.” She’s the evolution of a feeling. She’s an idea incarnated in the being. In the beginning there was only the idea. Then the word came into contact with the idea. And then the word was no longer mine: it transcended me, it was everyone’s, it was Angela’s.

  I’ve always wanted to find someday a person who would live for me because life is so full of useless things that I can only bear it through extreme muscular asthenia, I suffer from moral indolence in living. I tried to make Angela live in my place — but she too wants only the climax of life.

  Maybe I created Angela in order to have a dialogue with myself? I invented Angela because I need to invent myself — Angela is a startled woman.

  All I know I cannot prove. What I imagine is real, or else on what basis could I imagine Angela, who roars, bellows, moans, pants, bleating and growling and grunting.

  I feel as though I’ve already secretly achieved what I wanted and I still don’t know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called “experience”?

  AUTHOR: I fear when the earth was formed. What a tremendous cosmic boom.

  Through layer upon subterranean layer I reach the first man created. I reach the past of others. I recall this infinite and impersonal past which is without intelligence: it’s organic and it’s what worries me. I didn’t begin with myself when I was born. I began when the slow dinosaurs had begun. Or better yet: nothing begins. It’s like this: only when man takes notice through his simple gaze does a beginning appear to him. Yet — I give the appearance of contradiction — I already began many times. I’m beginning right now. As for Angela, she was born with me now, she strains to exist. Except I’m marginalized despite having a wife and kids — marginalized because I write. For instead of following the already-opened road I took a detour. Detours are dangerous. Whereas Angela is compliant and social.