A Breath of Life Read online

  Angela has within her water and desert, populace and hermitage, abundance and neediness, fear and defiance. She has within her eloquence and absurd muteness, surprise and antiquity, refinement and crudeness. She’s baroque.

  I extract my feelings and words from my absolute night.

  The difference between me and Angela can be felt. I cloistered in my narrow, anguished little world, not knowing how to leave to breathe in the beauty of what’s outside me. Angela, agile, graceful, full of the ringing of bells. I, seemingly bound to a destiny. Angela with the lightness of someone who has no end.

  Angela is continually being made and has no obligations to her own life or to literature or any art, she’s purposeless.

  Angela consoles herself for existing by thinking: “I at least have the advantage of being me, and not some random stranger.”

  I tame Angela. I have to cross mountains and desolate areas, flattened by cyclonic storms, inundated by torrential rains and scorched by a high and voracious sun as merciless as ideal justice. I traverse this woman like a ghost train, across hills and valleys, through sleeping cities. My hope is to find the slightest hint of an answer. I advance with caution.

  — I know that in Montserrat — mountains of intimate comfort and pure solitude — some ceramic objects were found from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, and the skeletons of two Iberians, the people who primitively inhabited the region. This awakens an excited soul that flickers within me at the mercy of unfettered winds. I wish I could make Angela aware of it but I don’t know how to fit into her life this knowledge that implies an exit from oneself into the terrain that is clear and of pure information. Precious information that situates me millennia ago and fascinates me with the dryness of the communication of the phrase.

  Cold and stupefying.

  I imagined the clear sound of drops of water falling into water — except that this minimal, delicate noise would be amplified beyond sound, in enormous crystalline drops with a wet ringing of bells sinking. In the cold and stupefying air the statues asleep.

  I am writing by groping along.

  Could it be I really know that I am I? This question arises because I notice that Angela doesn’t seem to know herself. She doesn’t realize that there is a center inside her and that it’s hard as a nut. From which words radiate. Phosphorescent.

  Dejection. The taste of a crushed cigarette.

  Sensation is the soul of the world. Is intelligence a sensation? In Angela it is.

  I recognize that my imitators are better than I am. Imitation is more refined than raw authenticity. I am under the impression that I’ve been imitating myself a bit. The worst plagiarism is plagiarizing yourself. The struggle is hard: if I am weak I shall die. As for Angela, I must say that I know perfectly well that she’s only a character. I’m absolutely lucid and can speak with some objectivity. But what I don’t understand is why I invented Angela Pralini. It was to deceive someone. Perhaps. The little popularity I have displeases me. And then there are my imitators. But what about me? What style should I turn to if I’ve already been so used and handled by some people who had the bad taste of being me? I’ll write a book so closed that it will only allow passage to a few. Or perhaps I’ll never write again. I know nothing. The future — as Angela would say — weighs down on me by the ton. I’m lost on this Sunday that’s neither hot nor cold, having already taken refuge in a movie theater.

  Could my fatal darkness be the promise of an also-fatal light? It so happens that I fear the fatal light and already have a certain intimacy with the dark.

  I’ve left the territory of the human and therefore left Angela too. I transcended myself with a certain degree of muteness and deafness: I’m living by a thread.

  I wished

  AUTHOR: I am the author of a woman I invented and to whom I gave the name Angela Pralini. I got along well with her. But she started to disturb me and I saw that once again I’d have to take on the role of writer in order to put Angela into words because only then can I communicate with her.

  I write one book and Angela writes another: I’ve removed the superfluous from both.

  I write at midnight because I am dark. Angela writes by day because she is almost always happy light.

  This is a book of non-memoirs. It is happening right now, it doesn’t matter when this right now was or is or shall be. It’s a book like sleeping deep and dreaming intensely — but there’s an instant when you awaken, sleep fades away, and only a taste of dream remains in the mouth and in the body, only the certainty of having slept and dreamt remains. I do everything possible to write by chance. I want the phrase to happen. I don’t know how to express myself in words. What I feel is not translatable. I express myself better through silence. Expressing myself through words is a challenge. But I’m not up to the challenge. Poor words emerge. And what is the secret word? I don’t know and why do I dare? Do I not know just because I don’t dare say it?

  I am well aware that I am in the dark and feed myself with my own vital darkness. Is my darkness a larva that has inside it perhaps a butterfly? It’s so dark that I’ve gone blind. I simply can’t write anymore. I’ll let Angela talk for a few days. As for me I think . . .

  ANGELA: Living leaves me atremble.

  AUTHOR: For me too life makes me shiver.

  ANGELA: I feel anxious and afflicted.

  AUTHOR: I see that Angela doesn’t quite know how to start. Being born is difficult. Should I advise her to talk more easily about facts? I’m going to teach her to start in the middle. She must stop being so hesitant because otherwise this whole book will be atremble, a drop of water dangling about to fall and when it falls it divides in splinters of scattered droplets. Take courage, Angela, start without paying too much attention.

  ANGELA: . . . and I ask myself whether I’m about to die. Because I write almost in a death rattle and feel dilacerated as in a final farewell.

  AUTHOR: Is this ultimately a dialogue or a double diary? I only know one thing: at this moment I’m writing: “at this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present: usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing.

  Angela is my attempt to be two. Unfortunately, however, because of the way things are, we resemble one another and she too writes because the only thing I know anything about is the act of writing. (Though I don’t write: I speak.)

  I did a quick inventory of my possessions and reached the frightening conclusion that the only thing we have that hasn’t been taken from us yet: our own names. Angela Pralini, a name as gratuitous as yours and which became the title of my trembling identity. Where will this identity lead me? What do I do with myself? Since not a single act symbolizes me.

  ANGELA: Astronomy leads me to a star of God.

  It rises in pure incense that shatters in words of glass.

  AUTHOR: My not-I is magnificent and surpasses me. Yet she is I to me.

  ANGELA: I was born amalgamated with the solitude of this exact moment and which is so drawn out, and so deep, that it is no longer my solitude but the Solitude of God. I finally reached the moment in which nothing exists. Not even tenderness from me to myself: this solitude is of the desert. The wind for company. Ah but what a dark cold it brings. I cover myself with soft melancholy, and gently rock back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Like that. Yes! Just like that.

  AUTHOR: Angela’s words are anti-words: they come from an abstract place inside her where one doesn’t think, that dark and vague and dripping place like a primitive cave. Angela, unlike me, rarely reasons: she just believes.

  Now because I’m afraid to write, I let you speak, even inconsequentially as I made you. Here you are, in your crazy unintelligible dialogue with me:

  ANGELA: I, frightened gazelle and yellow butterfly. I’m no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation. I breathe myself thee.

  I am oblique like the flight of birds. Inti
midated, without strength, without hope, without warning, without news — I tremble — I tremble—all over. I cast a sidelong glance at myself.

  What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.

  Living is an act I did not premeditate. I blossomed from the dark. I am only valid for myself. I must live little by little, it’s no good living everything at once. In someone’s arms I die completely. I am transformed into energy that has within it the nuclear atomic. I’m the result of having heard a warm voice long ago and having stepped off the train almost before it stopped — haste is the enemy of perfection and that’s how I ran toward the city missing immediately the station and the train’s next departure and its exceptional moment that awakens such a painful fright which is the whistle of the train, which is farewell.

  AUTHOR: Here she is talking as though with me but she talks to the air and not even to herself and only I can take advantage of what she says because she is from me and to me.

  Angela is my most brittle character. If she even manages to be a character: it’s one more example of life beyond-writing like life-beyond-death and beyond-word.

  Do I love Angela, because she says what I don’t have the courage to say because I am afraid of myself? or because I think speaking is useless? Because what you speak is lost like breath that leaves the mouth when you speak and that bit of breath is lost forever.

  ANGELA: I love you as much as if I were always bidding you farewell. When I’m too alone, I fasten rattles to my ankles and wrists. That way almost all my thoughts are externalized and return to me as replies. My slightest energy makes them vibrate immediately in a quiver of light and sound. I have to be my friend or else I can’t bear the solitude. When I am alone I try not to think because I am afraid of suddenly thinking a thing too new for myself. To speak out loud alone and to “what” is to address the world, it’s to create a powerful voice that achieves — achieves what? The answer: it achieves the “what.” “What” is the sacred sanctity of the universe.

  AUTHOR: Neither do I know how to not-think. It happens without effort. It’s only hard when I try to obtain that silent darkness. When I’m distracted, I fall into shadow and into the hollow and into the sweet and into the smooth nothing-of-me. I refresh myself. And I believe. I believe in magic, then. I know how to create within me an atmosphere of the miraculous. I concentrate without any object in mind — and I feel myself taken by a light. It’s a gratuitous miracle, without form and without meaning — like the air that I inhale deeply until I get dizzy for a few seconds. A miracle is the crux of living. When I think, I ruin everything. That’s why I avoid thinking: all I really do is go on going on. And without questions about why or whither. If I think, a thing doesn’t turn up, I don’t happen. A thing that certainly is free to go as long as it’s not imprisoned by thought.

  ANGELA: I take deep pleasure in prayer — and making intimate and intense contact with the mysterious life of God. There is nothing in the world that can substitute the joy of prayer.

  Today I swept the terrace where I keep my plants. How good it is to handle the things of this world: the dry leaves, the pollen of things (dust is the daughter of things). My daily life is very adorned.

  I’m being profoundly happy.

  AUTHOR: Speak, Angela, speak even without making sense, speak so that I won’t completely die.

  ANGELA: I’m in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.

  AUTHOR: I’m going on holiday from myself and letting Angela do the talking. If one day I should read these things I’m writing, I want to find in the black pit of night thousands of mute fireworks but accompanied by the splinters of thousands of singing crystals. That is the dark night I want to find one day outside me and within. Angela has just made me suddenly feel something within and I felt happy. Extremely happy, I don’t know why. Do I accept it? No, for some secret reason I feel a great burden of uneasiness and anxiety when I reach the snowy peak of a happiness-light. The too-purified air hurts my body.

  Angela has wings.

  ANGELA: I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.

  AUTHOR: When I was a person, and not yet this rigorous being filled with words, I was more misunderstood by me. But I accepted myself as a whole. But the word slowly kept demystifying me and forcing me not to lie. I can still sometimes lie to others. But as for me my innocence ended and I am dealing more with an obscure reality that I nearly, nearly grasp. It’s a secret truth, sealed, and I sometimes get lost in its fleeting aspect. I am only worthwhile as a discovery.

  ANGELA: I’m an actress to myself. I pretend that I am a particular person but in reality I am nothing.

  AUTHOR: I thought that a seven-pointed polyhedron could be divided into seven equal parts within a circle. But I don’t fit. I am outside. Is it my fault if I don’t have access to myself?

  ANGELA: I don’t fall into the foolishness of being sincere.

  AUTHOR: Anyway, Angela, what is it that you do?

  ANGELA: I take care of life.

  The great night of the world when there was no life.

  AUTHOR: Angela represents the only person she is: there only exists one Angela. Not a single act of mine is I. Angela shall be the act that represents me.

  I lost sight of my destiny. My asking is never exhausted. I ask. What do I ask for? This: the possibility of eternally asking. I have no mission: I live because I was born. And I shall die without death symbolizing me. Outside of me I am Angela. Inside of me I am anonymous. Living demands such audacity. I feel as lost as if sleeping in the desert of the Treasury Department.

  — Angela, now I am speaking directly to you and ask you for the love of God to cry already. Do, please, give your consent and cry. Because, as for me, I can’t stand waiting any longer. Scream out in pain! A red scream! And the tears burst the flood-gates and wash a tired face. Wash as if they were morning dew.

  ANGELA: Am I pure?

  AUTHOR: Purity would be as violent as the color white. Angela is the color of hazelnut.

  I have a great need to live from much poverty of spirit and not have any luxury of soul. Angela is luxury and upsets me. I will move away from her and enter a monastery, which is to say, become poor. I chose today to wear some very old trousers and a torn shirt. I feel good dressed in rags, I am nostalgic for poverty. I ate only fruit and eggs, I refused the rich blood of meat, I wanted to eat only what’s born without agony, just blossoming naked like the egg, like the grape.

  I didn’t sleep with my wife last night because a woman is luxury and extravagance, and makes me into two, and I want to be only one in order not to be a number divisible by any other. I drank water while fasting. And slowly entered my own and immeasurable and infinite desert. When in this desert my penury becomes intolerable — I create Angela as a mirage, illusion of optics and spirit, but I must abstain from Angela because she is a richness of soul.

  Just now I wanted to make Angela paint.

  ANGELA: I’m painting a picture with the name “Meaningless.” They are random things — objects and beings without any connection, like a butterfly and a sewing machine.

  [Author narrating the facts of Angela’s life]

  I’ll run through the facts as quickly as possible because I’m in a hurry. The most secret of meditations awaits me.

  To write I begin by stripping myself of words. I prefer the poor words left over.

  I’ll give a quick biographical sketch of Angela Pralini: quickly because facts and particulars bore me. So let’s see: born in Rio de Janeiro, 34 years old, five foot six and of good family though the daughter of poor parents. Married an industrialist, etc.

  ANGELA: I am as individual as a passport. I’ve got a police record. Should I be proud to be part of the
world or does it discredit me?

  AUTHOR: There’s something sweet in Angela’s eyes, something reckless, a humid velvet, dull pearls but brown and sometimes hard like two chestnuts. Sometimes she has eyes like those of a cow being milked. Sweaty eyes. A glittering and mellifluous bee that hovers above me in search of my honey to hide it away as it was hidden in me. Angela is still a closed cocoon, as if I were not yet born, until I open myself in metamorphosis, Angela will be mine. When I am strong enough to be alone and mute — then I will free forever the butterfly from its cocoon. And even if it lives for only a day, that butterfly, it is already useful to me: may it flutter its bright colors above the green brightness of the plants in a garden on a summer’s morning. When the morning is still early, it looks just like a light butterfly. Whatever is even lighter than a butterfly. A butterfly is a petal that flies.

  ANGELA: The dancing of the guests.

  Ireland, never shalt thou see me. Malta, of Malta, thou art the prison. A bloody finger points upward. And I remember the future.

  Dutch — is what I am. And I am September too. So many fruits the lady has. The dog searching for its own tail. Help! fire! And I am chamber music.

  AUTHOR: Angela is a curve in an interminable sinuous spiral. I am upright, I write triangularly and pyramidally. But whatever is inside the pyramid — the untouchable, dangerous and inviolable secret — is Angela. What Angela writes can be read aloud: her words are voluptuous and give physical pleasure. I am geometric, Angela is a spiral, all finesse. She is intuitive, I am logical. She is not afraid to err in the use of words. And I do not err. I am well aware that she is the succulent grape and I am the raisin. I am balanced and sensible. She is free of balance which for her is unnecessary. I am controlled, she doesn’t repress herself — I suffer more than she does because I am imprisoned in a narrow cage of forced mental hygiene. I suffer more because I don’t say why I suffer.