Magdalena Tulli: Moving Parts

And the four characters of this story — at least one too many — shouldn’t count on anything more as they wander through the murky space. Wasn’t this supposed to have been a short tale of betrayal pinned on a three-sided frame? The fewer the characters, the simpler the narrator’s task. He could still pretend that he has forgotten about the desk clerk, and ignore her existence the way he ignores the leather armchairs in the hotel lobby. But all that was needed was a moment of distraction, the confusion that arose as he was gazing at the smooth and clear panes of glass, seeking a good way out for himself, for additional, redundant figures to appear; they’ve already dispersed among the walls, among the furniture, considerably more than the four which should have been consented to at once, like it or not. Moreover, the narrator may be sure that if any one of them is overlooked, gaps will emerge and the story will stop running smoothly. It’s too late now to get rid of the hobo with the earring, the retired gentleman with rheumatism, or the little boy. And also the workmen in overalls, even if appearances suggest that from where they were sent by an unfortunate combination of circumstances, they will no longer return. They can’t be expected to content themselves with the gentle presence granted to those who are dead and are reconciled with death, free of resentments or hidden intentions, their silence concealing nothing. Even less can a courteous passivity be counted on from the alleged paid killer, and there is no hope that he at least, lurking unseen, can be excluded from the subsequent course of events.

Every turn of affairs has its price, enforced as relentlessly as the prices of goods placed on a slowly moving belt at the checkout counter of a store. Not even a fiasco is free. And in fact it costs the most of all. The thrifty customers compare price tags with cool calculation, figuring out how much they can afford and denying themselves one thing or another. And it’s only when they are thoroughly embroiled in the ups and downs of their stories that their heads start to spin, their reason is impaired and they choose courses of action for which they lack the wherewithal. If the balance sheet is to add up, someone else will have to pay. And best of all would be if that someone just disappeared from view immediately afterward. No one wants to be in debt. Are narrators made of a different clay than everyone else? They would wait in vain for gratitude and compassion, and thus they themselves are also essentially ungrateful and feel no compassion for anyone.

Such comments prefer the muddy waters of the present tense; they wallow in them, especially if they’re unwilling to enter into details and merely wish in their slapdash way to grasp the essence of things. And so no end is in sight for the torments of associating with the present tense. Its waves, now descending into the clownish rhythm of generalizations, now bearing like dirty foam the words ‘probably’ and ‘let’s say,’ wash over the clauses of complex sentences, one after another, immersing them in uncertainty and ignorance. The narrator remains calm, having nothing to lose in the surging waters. Only the scrap of life that is his lot, and the unpleasant burden of an imposed duty. The present moment is a hotbed of confusion through which one treads without seeing a thing. The hand and the head float separately in it. Shoes appear alternately to the rhythm of the steps, now the right, now the left. And one may feel more or less as if between head and feet there was absolutely nothing except the roiling depths. The present tense commands life and death, but it is plagued by indistinct outlines, undulating shapes, and hazy backgrounds, and so the decrees of fate are capricious and blind. Of course, the metaphor of the waters has its limitations, like everything. The narrator’s clothing has not absorbed its moisture; nor do his shoes, never mind what make they are, leave wet footprints. Though he does wear shoes. This doesn’t mean that he bought them in a store, that for example he sat on the little measuring chair, that for him boxes were taken down from the shelves and opened and he was shown successive choices until at last he decided on a pair. Nothing of the sort — he was called into being complete with shoes, and now they are stepping softly across the middle of the lobby. In a moment they’ll go down some narrow stairs. The iron structure twisting in a spiral might surprise an eye that had previously admired the interior of the lobby, glittering with gaudy newness. But in any case it’s out of sight, well hidden from the gaze of guests lounging in the leather armchairs. These are old walls; what is new are only the panes of glass and the slabs of synthetic stone, so smooth that the sediment of memories doesn’t settle on them. Was mention not already made of levels of cellars in which one can walk along passageways amid a tangle of piping and cables? And why should one walk there at all? Why should one then take another staircase, wooden this time, over which there hovers the musty smell of turpentine floor polish? A burgundy carpet, fixed to the steps with blackened brass rods, muffles the sound of footfalls. The somewhat timeworn paneling has taken on the dark hue of mahogany in the light of bracket lamps with chiffon shades reminiscent of the days of narrow-waisted dresses for women, and for men the opposite — loose-fitting jackets with padded shoulders and wide pants with cuffs. Nothing else should be expected in the oldest wing of the hotel, given over in its entirety for the use of permanent residents.

The narrator calmly opens and closes a double door and puts a bunch of keys on a round side table. He was given a room with a balcony and is living in it, whatever that might mean. From the height of several stories he sees miniature cars of all different colors moving along the roadway. Higher up are rows of roofs, chimneys, billows of white steam issuing from ventilation shafts. Clouds drift over the rooftops, one after another. Every kind of cloud, though — it goes without saying — never at the same time. It would be a simple thing to calculate how many of them have floated by since the hotel was built until the present moment. But this doesn’t mean that the narrator has watched every one. He was summoned to being along with the window outside which all these clouds have passed, along with the snows that fell from them and melted, along with the rains of former seasons. With a whole prior life, so that it doesn’t look as though he were born yesterday. Apart from the dull clouds over colorless and rumpled November mornings when everything seems unimportant, there also exist fluffy ones, white as ice cream on hot summer afternoons, that stand wide open toward long, warm, brightly colored evenings; and also little luminous clouds that pass like falling petals across a wasted spring afternoon a moment before dusk. Yet the unease that prevents one from staring too long at a darkened sky must have a cause. To be safe, it would be better to block the door with a heavy armchair. Then the distance from the balcony to the chair is no greater than ten paces; the narrator crosses it unhurriedly and at the armchair turns back. When he’s once again at the halfway point there is a knock at the door. This moment is best endured in immobility. The knock may repeat; it may repeat many times. For a moment it may turn into a thunderous hammering. Is it really necessary to go into such details as the dust rising from the door frame? That which is pushed by the hands of a watch weighs nothing at all; in the end silence falls, as if there were no one on either side of the door. Silence is the natural state to which any noise must return, and from a certain point of view, on each side of the door there is in fact nobody, and the narrator ought to confess that he is aware of this. Nevertheless, a moment later receding steps are heard on the creaking stairs. It’s only now that it is possible to look calmly at the blue of denim overalls passing through the gloom in a blotch with hazy edges in ever lower regions of the field of vision — which is extremely narrow, restricted by the sides of the keyhole — and eventually disappearing without trace below its bottom rim. The narrator is not curious to know what the figures wanted from him: extra attention, special privileges, an opportunity to finally remove the little girl’s photograph from the wallet, an action for which suitable conditions were not created on the previous occasion. As if the photograph were supposed to lend support to predictable complaints and claims, above which there still rises the pathetic question ‘why,’ and even worse, the importunate word ‘let,’ the latter paving the way for a frontal attack by exclamation points with excessive demands. The narrator, barricaded inside, attempts just in case to ignore the ringing telephone, too. But, tormented by its insistence, in the end he reaches for the receiver. What happens next is not as hopeless as might have been expected. A polite female voice passes on a message concerning the actions he needs immediately to undertake; that’s all. Instead of a guiding principle that would give his labors a meaning, he has to be satisfied with the promise of payment to be made in the afternoon. The instructions assume tacitly that any kind of doubt yields before the irresistible power of money.