way of working, don’t you think? One way to arrive at an outcome, meeting the problem head-on without flinching. In those days they weren’t too sensitive about hygiene, not yet having discovered any of our contemporary medical certainties, let alone the pseudo-truths of science! In those days you could certainly get away with just using your imagination alone to depict the sloughed-off mortal coils of your fellow men—people would swallow it! What, you never read about that? Pontormo’s astonishing laboratory? And yet, there are severable credible sources that attest to it, there was even some talk among ecclesiastics at the time. Because the church, being both Pontormo’s sponsor and the venue in which his work was executed, was concerned on both counts. Just imagine the scene! On the one hand there was the anxious clergy, suspicious. On the other, the already aged painter, sick and nauseated as often as not, obsessed by what he eats and drinks, fearful of excess, afraid he too will explode. He can feel it coming, death, he’s intrigued by it. Absorbed by his frescoes, huge, interminable, the job he’s been working to complete for twelve years, hidden from sight, he no longer meets with anyone. Relentless worker, that fellow! And when he goes home at night, there too he shuts himself in and plunges into his experiments, moving his cadavers around with a big stick, regrouping them, stirring them up, oblivious to the smell. He can’t smell anything anymore, or else he just doesn’t care: he sees. A fantastic composition of decomposition. So then, memory? A painter of memory? Other ‘mannerist’ painters perhaps—students, rivals, drawing their art from the combined successes of the past. But not Pontormo! Only the present, his present, absolute, unprecedented. To the point of going to see, directly, exactly how it happens, from the point of view of death and what follows death, under certain set conditions.”
It was raining, I’d suggested taking a bus. His icecream shop, the best in the city, wasn’t particularly close and that way we’d avoid the puddles. But Robert would hear none of it, in spite of the persistent cold that had gone on for too many days now. After all those stories about the South, the sun, the fine weather, this year was pretty much a washout. What’s more, this happens every year. But no one’s ever willing to admit it. For people living in the city, for the tourists, for everybody in short, the South ought to be warm. They can’t make that claim anymore. “No winter” is just something they say, as if to convince themselves of it. And now here’s this old man suggesting ice cream! I couldn’t, however, refuse. I didn’t want to interrupt him; there was so much knowledge inside his head, right there, ready, instantly available, that he intimidated me. How unlike my machine and my laborious manipulations. So we walked along like this through the tiny, rain-spattered streets and the ends of some of his sentences got lost in the raging wind sweeping through from all directions, lashing against our faces. I’d have liked him to talk even longer and only regretted that I couldn’t be noting it all down, because I imagined that I would forget all, or almost all of it. This, however, was a unique moment of sudden acceleration in the construction of my memory. Because he seemed to know everything, this old man.
Pontormo had to be his passion, his idol considering the way he talked about him, and the way he’d fly off the handle about those who had neglected or scorned him. “That they could have dared get rid of the San Lorenzo frescoes! Twelve years of stubborn, exhausting labor, dozens of square yards in a final act of defiance! It’s a miracle that the sketches have been preserved. Especially since his preliminary drawings are masterpieces more often than not! Just as they are, with those outlandish faces, those people caught in the most incredible positions, the movement of a split-second. And not just the sketches of the Last Judgment. Remember the ones for Vertumnus and Pomona, his first big fresco commission, studies in black stone, magnificent. Bodies suspended between flying and falling. Because that’s really what’s extraordinary about them: they act as if they weren’t falling, or not necessarily falling. Not being accountable to weight, or any other law, human, physical, or scientific!” And at this he waved his arms in great volutes and scrolls suddenly interrupted by somebody’s clumsy umbrella. Robert very nearly got himself hurt. In any event, the old man’s fervor was cut short. Or maybe he’d finished with Pontormo.
Robert, to go on with our conversation, asked me what I did for a living. Feeling that I was protected by his verbosity, snugly enclosed in my listening and admiring, I wasn’t expecting any questions. I tried to answer, my words incoherent because my mouth was numb from the cold: a few beginnings of sentences, computers, something I was studying, a memory.
“Ah! Computers . . . Why not? Just as long as you can include value, values, in your system—the exclamation marks rising like little gasps in the pervasive drone! Yes, a permanent classification, and personal! Otherwise, you just make the same error as our public institutions, those huge, anonymous, sterile dumping grounds called public libraries. I didn’t dare say this to you just now, with that library employee standing right behind me, but . . . I hate those places. Oh yes. I call a library ‘public’ the moment it gets out of the hands of a single individual. As if it were possible to share a collection of books, how they’re classified, what’s next to what, that very particular set of relationships . . . and shared in huge numbers, can’t halt progress, international connections! You must have heard about that? Soon all the big libraries are to be connected, a huge tide of monitors, a standardized procession of texts on recycled paper, all in the same typeface, regardless of genre, rhythm, tone. Watch out! It seems incredible, but ten, twenty years from now manuscripts will be relegated to cellars, reformatted onto diskettes or cassettes! The book, its texture, its flavor—done for. Machines to grind them up until they’re one-dimensional, passionless, and so can be ingested more quickly. But there’s no one rebelling against this, nobody even considers it surprising!” We were already where we were going—which seemed to astonish him. But he wasn’t done with his rage. “A beautiful, deathly place, their mausoleums for printed matter! Huge temples of pseudo-sharing! Or real sharing, because in the final analysis all that’s there is, cadavers, decaying carcasses, and those can be split up as much as you like, since they aren’t alive at all. That, you’ll see, is something entirely different; it’s impossible to share a living book, living in itself or in you. Impossible!”
It was nice and warm inside the ice cream shop when we went inside after our painful trek across the city, its narrow alleyways, made all the more rapid by the raging rivulets of rain. I didn’t like libraries either. Was physically incapable of remaining inside them except in little, homeopathic doses, and at the cost of persistent discomfort. But my reasons would certainly turn out to be less noble than his. What I couldn’t stand was to see that insatiable crowd reading books I didn’t know, or anyhow not yet, ones I’d perhaps never know and frequently whose titles I didn’t even recognize. Yes, discouraging, all those people who served to tally the cruel depth of my omissions, the scope of the task I had yet to complete. As for those holding in their hands a volume I’d already read and assimilated, that wasn’t much better. In fact worse. Were they paying attention to such and such detail? Were they noticing the same bits as I? Or were they focusing on others I might have missed? I’d set the process of remembering in motion like a test whose outcome would be nothing but a painful collapse into forgetfulness, then nothing: no memory, no echo, just barely a code, the title of a diskette, put away somewhere for later, much later. However, there with Robert, I merely agreed, a library was indeed not an easy space to share, in any case, it posed some problems. As for the rest of it, I had no fixed notions. Actually, his point of view seemed exaggerated to me, affected. But his breakneck recitation had brought him to the boiling point and I wanted both to calm him down and, at all costs, to avoid a prolonged discussion—hardly a treat in the frigid air of their so-called South.
He wanted to sit in the back, the very back of the room, on the soft banquette that seemed to be holding up the huge mirror occupying that entire wall. We could watch the customers in peace from there. Ice cream, now! That, I should have realized immediately, was a sign that there was something the matter with this old man. But he was insistent, even denying me the right simply to drink a café or some herbal tea. So I thought up a combination. Sabayon! And chocolate, and wild berry! Usually I’d order pineapple, and banana, and raspberry; that is, on the very few times I came here with Mattilda for a special treat. But that day conditions were so different, you might say exotic, that I wanted to have something new, befitting the moment.
