José Manuel Prieto - Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

ENCYCLOPEDIA. A porter offered to carry my luggage to the taxi stand. He awaited my response patiently, eyes glued to the floor. I noted the cloth cap, smoke weaving from a filter cigarette, the tight checked jacket, and in tones of vox dei delivered a severe warning from on high: “No rushing off to the taxi, boy. I’ve just arrived in P** and am not in the mood to go chasing after you. I’ll bring you down with one shot or use a little gas — you’ll be shedding some tears, believe me.”

(That was me, barking orders like a ship’s captain who must keep his boisterous crew in check, a skill indispensable to anyone who wishes to move about the Grand Duchy of Muscovy unscathed; without it I’d have little chance of bringing my ambitious undertaking to a happy conclusion, my luggage stolen right there in the train station by one of these fake porters.)

At the taxi stand I handed some bills to the unkempt individual in question, who made no secret of his disappointment. He swayed querulously on his short legs; it was clear he’d been hoping for a different sort of client. (He hadn’t figured it out until he heard me threaten him with native fluency.)

“It’s enough to buy cigarettes,” I told him.

“Depends what kind. I’d like to smoke those. .” (With an accusatory stare at the blondes he’d glimpsed in my pocket.)

I shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “you would never carry other people’s bags in a train station. Am I right?”

“That’s true. I have other plans for my stay here in P**.”

“Know something? I haven’t always been a guy who carried suitcases around. A few years ago. . Hey, be careful!” he shouted when he saw me open the taxi door.

I swiveled to gaze back at him, intrigued. He might turn out to be one of those insignificant characters we pay no attention to at the beginning of the movie, who then, two reels later, is revealed to be the murderer. Thank God it was only a bit of domestic advice he wanted to proffer: Be wary of taxi drivers, look both ways when crossing the street.

“Don’t worry, it’s not my first time in P**,” I said, and once inside I rolled down the window and handed my pack of cigarettes out to the porter in distress: “Have a smoke on me, Dimitri!”

“(Kolia.)”

“Have a smoke, Kolia!” I repeated, then gave my orders to the driver: “The Astoria.”

(Great floods periodically inundate Saint Petersburg. Sea swells from the Gulf of Finland rush through the mouth of the Neva River and wash across the lower parts of the city. Many buildings bear a watermark a meter and a half above ground.)

I. Listen: phrases that might at first seem simple, such as “Agreed, LINDA. At the end of the summer we’ll take a trip to YALTA” 1are merely cryptograms that enclose and conceal their true meaning, which is “Agreed, LINDA. At the end of the summer we’ll take a trip to YALTA.” This latter sentence composed, in its turn, of elementary roots, the primary concepts that are indispensible to any reader seeking to comprehend BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL, the novel I’m planning to write.

I must set forth concepts such as KVAS, BOSCAGE (or FOREST, CONIFEROUS), INDIGO, in order to establish a framework of reference for the story I tell, a story that will exist in suspension among the vector convergence of these entries, or voces (voices) as they’re known in my language. Set in small caps, to differentiate them, the entries are like black holes, exits into universes of other meanings, junctures crossing through the mass of the text to give it cohesion. Such a structure presupposes a reading that will be nonlinear and unending, for on consulting ROMANZAS you will be prompted to see RADIO, and that entry will send you to IMPERIUM, and so on interminably. Yet I do not seek a total sampling that would exhaust all possibilities; I’ll limit myself to assembling a minimal number of entries that, in combination — Пропп (Propp) and his morphology of the folktale, Georges Polti’s list of the thirty-six dramatic situations — can reproduce the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the unknown world. I could have called this my Expert System, for mine is the type of ENCYCLOPEDIA that addresses a particular subject, works such as the Enciclopedia Dantesca or the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, both of which I consulted in composing this opus. The simplicity of the subject matter, the overtly trivial idea of frivolity, of tangential living, diminishes the complexity of the method to some degree, even as it facilitates the task of keeping all the entries in mind. Moreover, the philosophy of the moment — which this ENCYCLOPEDIA seeks to summarize — operates by instants, exists in the present. The synchronic and circular conception of my work proposes the same thing.

It would have been easy to reorganize the text so that it advanced chronologically, much like Hesse’s KLINGSOR’S LAST SUMMER, or any other novel written without artifice. But I deemed it more interesting for this reordering to occur in the reader’s mind, as when, on turning the final page of a detective novel, all the pieces of the puzzle —the gloved murderer and that doctor in the first scene are one and the same! — fall into place.

Finally, a curious coincidence: in the Instauratio Magna, the ENCYCLOPEDIA Sir Francis Bacon planned to write, the subject headings for the section titled “Man’s Action on Nature” are almost identical to mine, it’s rather extraordinary:

Vision and the Visual Arts. Hearing, Sound and Music. Smell, and Smells. Taste, and Tastes. Touch and Objects of Touch (including physical love). Pleasure and Pain. The Emotions. The Intellectual Faculties. Food, Drink, etc. The Care of the Person. Clothing, Architecture, Navigation. Printing, Books, Writing.

A few additional topics — EURASIA, HARD FROSTS, OPIUM — would complete the list for my project. (You already know the story: THELONIOUS arrives in Saint Petersburg in search of LINDA, the young woman he requires in order to carry out a delicate experiment. They are to make a trip together to YALTA, in the Crimea, and later, if all goes well, to Nice. The story takes place from late spring to early winter of 1991, months before the COLLAPSE OF THE IMPERIUM.)

ABACUS. The satisfaction of embarking upon this ENCYCLOPEDIA with an entry that figures on the first page of so many. We find the ABACUS throughout Russia. Fabricated of metal, wood, and bone. Displayed on many a counter as a guarantee of impartial computation, yet serving primarily as a means of swindling the buyer, who never quite manages to grasp, who follows the play of beads along wires, hypnotized. Having consulted the complex framework of the ABACUS, golden-haired oracles announce impenetrable results, weighted in their favor by at least 10 percent. (I’ve known shrewd customers to carry a pocket ABACUS for rapid verification.)

I often asked K** to teach me how to use one, an art she’s known from the time she was a girl, but I never managed to get past the hundreds column to the final wire.