José Manuel Prieto - Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

She had been listening attentively but then let out a shriek. “My God, something’s happening to your shoes!”

As if abandoned there on the gravel and entirely alien to me, my BOOGIE SHOES were emitting a fluorescent glow that pulsated more intensely from time to time. In just a few seconds they grew to several times their normal size and stretched all the way across the path, inflating to a malevolent roundness.

I. That same voice, previously: “. . though I’m not an emissary from the devil.” (An entirely superfluous justification.) The MASTER who, weakened by a strange malady, knows his death is approaching and makes a pact with the devil. For a while now, THELONIOUS has toyed with the idea of an essay on frivolity, and has disposed of the amount of whalebone necessary to elaborate a Tractatus (Basel, 1650). Finally, he decided upon an essay in the primitive sense of the word: an alchemical experiment. To mix all his dandified knowledge within the vessel of a young soul, to bequeath his vision to an innocent girl. To gain her consent, THELONIOUS tempts her with a model’s life and even resorts to a brief demonstration of his alchemical powers, transforming his shoes before her eyes. Булгáков (Bulgakov), in THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, describes a similar scene, from which I excerpt this passage: Удивленная Маргарита Николаевна повернулась и увидела на своей скамейке гражданина, который, очевидно, бесшумно подсел в то время, когда Маргарита загляделась на процессию и, надо полагать, в рассеянности вслух задала свой последний вопрос. .Рыжий оглянулся и сказал таинственно — Меня прислали, чтобы вас сегодня вечером пригласить в гости. — Что вы бредите, какие гости?. . — К одному очень знатному иностранцу — значительно сказал рыжий, прищурив глаз. . — Я приглашаю вас к иностранцу совершенно безопасному. И ни одна душа не будет знать об этом посещении. Вот уж за это я вам ручаюсь. — А зачем я ему понадобилась? — вкрадчиво спросила Маргарита. — Вы об этом узнаете позже. — Понимаю. . Я должна ему отдаться — сказала Маргарита задумчиво. MARGARITA Nikolayevna turned with a start and found an individual beside her on the bench. He must have taken advantage of her absorption in the procession — the same absorption that had made her speak her question aloud — to sit down there.The red-haired man looked around, then said in a mysterious tone, “I’ve been sent here to deliver an invitation for this evening to you.”“You must be mad. What sort of invitation?”“An invitation to the home of a very illustrious foreigner,” said the red-haired stranger, narrowing one eye with an air of great significance. “I’m inviting you to the home of a foreign gentleman who can do you no harm. Furthermore, no one will be aware of your visit. You have my word on that.“And what does he need me for?” MARGARITA asked timidly.“You’ll learn that in time.”“I understand . . I must let him have his way with me,” said MARGARITA pensively.

In the end, Azazello, emissary of Woland, the devil, gives MARGARITA a magical unguent that will enable her to fly. THELONIOUS, too, will one day fly, before LINDA’S astonished eyes.

MEMORY BUFFER. It’s an instant of seeing yourself from the outside, holding your breath while it happens. It allows us to postpone, for a thousandth of a second, the experience of the smiling face, and receive it steadily, free of the trembling of our hands. It allows for a minimum interval of certainty between the eye and the real image, a lapse of time that is sufficient to work it through entirely and render it in improved form, ready to be digested. It is a gulf of temporary oblivion, a subtle snare, a pass of the prestidigitator’s hand. (LINDA would film our entire journey through Crimea. I showed her how to do this with my camcorder, the latest model, complete with MEMORY BUFFER.)

“I want to show you how the instant camera works, too.” (The machine whirring in my hands.) “Look at this,” I said, handing her the shot. “Those are your legs.” (LINDA’S agile legs encased in jeans, slender and rounded, much preferable to the sight of them unclad: ugly prolongations of the torso finished off with feet, her toes joined to each other by a membrane: the mallard’s webbed feet. )

“Don’t you think they’re easier to see there, in the photo?”

I. “Stay, swift instant, you are so fair!” How difficult it is to put down on paper the deep sorrow, the sad evocation of unhappy love, that a song evokes when it moves us for a moment. It’s always while we’re living, never while we’re remembering the past, that we would like to be conceded the grace of an eternal moment. We can’t imagine that Goethe uttered this phrase as he read an obscure poet of the Ming dynasty in the solitude of his study. Only when we breathe happily beneath a blue sky do we want to halt time, to withstand every one of its tiniest recesses.

But time’s nature is inapprehensible; it remains deep in the background of our lives and, incapable of observing it objectively from the present moment, we know nothing, in the end, of its fierce transit. Only when we spend an idle moment leafing through old fashion magazines do we discover the degree to which that humanity, those others so different from ourselves, entered into contact with eternity. For the fashion that dictates a certain type of hairstyle — a feeling of well-being when attired in a made-to-measure suit, throatily tra-la-la- ing with all the exaltation of an opera singer, some tune from the last movie we saw — frees us from our fears about what was and what will be, to live in a perfect, orgiastic present.

a) In order to put past time — the old fashions — to the test, I have a scratched record with the songs I once enjoyed, a test-record. Each time I listen to it, there is, between today’s “I” and the song that only yesterday filled me to my brim, an immense space, difficult to conceive of. The bass is no longer today’s bass, so juicy, so pectoral; the highs are scandalously strident, the voices saccharine, the keyboards tinny. “What’s missing here?” I wonder, displeased by this pallid music and the answer is: life is missing. Life, seasoned with the salt of frivolity, which is like the water we add to these dry, dehydrated songs to make them appetizing.

The idea of the past, the history of the universe, would be incomplete without this slight adjustment. The sensation of well-being — between sheets whose colorful patterns are designed to accord with the feeling of a today that already, by tomorrow, will be an embarrassing yesterday when it sees itself reflected with appalling fidelity in the photos of yesteryear and the collections of “oldies but goodies” advertised on the RADIO — is the principal motor of existence. Trivial, yes: but then life is, too.

MOON WALK. One afternoon we stopped at a pension in Yevpatoriya, beside the sea. As night fell, we strolled down to the little square with its dance floor where older couples, clearly VILLAGERS, circled slowly, as if they were herding the foreign rhythms that poured forth inexorably from the loudspeaker. I wanted to teach LINDA to dance and thus enable her to divine the beat’s hidden accents without dispersing her energies in the cymbals’ reverberation to smooth out the angles and display her skill at sketching the broader cadences that enclose the rhythm’s less perceptible tremors.