Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

Two squires stood guard over them, as if at my command (true, no such order had even occurred to me), and I went back to the courtyard. When the gate had once again shut behind me, I hesitated in my response as to whether I would actually go find a wagon or not. That is, I really had gone there for a wagon, already knowing beyond any doubt, however, that I would find neither a wagon, nor the squires, nor the crowd. And, in fact, the courtyard was empty; all that remained were the campfires, smoldering away somehow, as if they ran on the coming dawn. And face-to-face with a prediction so magnificently affirmed, I was forced to search my conscience, knowing that I would have to answer the question of whether I had somehow deliberately deluded myself into going for the wagon, knowing it would not be there. — The courtyard was deserted, but again there was the ineradicable sense of human-ness, nearby and all-embracing, just as when we were driving into Saint-Cloud. I turned back toward the watery landscape, accepting as quite natural that there was no aquatic landscape, nor Fuld, nor Giggles, nor soldiers in armor; in short, that I was walking through a so-called living dream, a quite truthful reality, and thus, as they say, a zone of truth, where there is nothing with which to deceive oneself, that what this is here is an entrance to the Métro, which I, descending the staircase, in fact also quickly recognized by its red lights.

So I was descending the staircase, and I was feeling so embarrassed about the answer as to whether I was still shuffling along the zone of truth, or else had already popped out of it, that I decided to establish what was what, come what may. I paid for my ticket with money that would require the cashier to give me change. I determined not to pick it up. If the cashier alerts me to it, that will be proof that I’m awake; if she doesn’t call after me, I’ll know that I’m dreaming. I conducted the experiment, even if I was aware that it was actually a sham: I knew in advance that the cashier could not not call for me, for such is the custom . And she actually did. And because I made like I hadn’t heard, she went so far as to send an assistant after me. An inspiration passed through me, that the constant confirmation of my prediction simply means there’s no point looking for safety. For where there is only an inch of room for doubt — perhaps in the associative hint of a slight dry spot in an aquatic landscape — certainty is merely a word. . and who knows. — The train arrived, I got on, the train moved on.

He boarded at La Trinité. My first sense was vexation at not having foreseen it. But was this really my only cause for regret? How was I to regret not having foreseen something — that is to say, his boarding at La Trinité—that had so convincing an air of originality? His boarding did not arouse memories of some event in the past. If I foresaw it — despite the fact that things that are being prepared will be a faithful analogy of what has occurred in some “back then”—I foresaw it in no way through some concrete experience, but rather only the way we sort of foresee the da capo in a minuet.

Were I to hold fast to this event, I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise than retrace quite literally the beginning of that very game. But what for, if I can simply refer to it? Very well. –

Nevertheless. .: The stranger, even if he was utterly human at the outset, didn’t, in fact, seem a stranger completely : through the likeness of the Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, or rather beneath it somehow, I just now recognized Fuld. But against expectations this discovery did not excite me in the least. The bizarre reality that Vicente Escudero was Fuld, while nevertheless remaining Vicente Escudero, was a matter of such indifference to me that I undertook nothing to identify him further — with my ears, say — except with my perhaps faulty eyesight. I did nothing to move him to speak, not even a single word. Here I was as though before something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, despite my being utterly secure in knowing that this was Fuld, when a three-note motif suddenly inserted itself between us. Yes, three notes, which you could hear — it might not have been possible to say where from — and which, once they’d subsided, nevertheless carried on, this time somehow objectively. I can’t say it any other way than this: they carried on in the manner of a monkey wrench operating on large threads, a wrench that had been inserted between my fellow traveler and me, and now promptly extended itself, parting us irresistibly, one from the other. I turned in on myself noticeably, enough so that I was, at length, alone in an oppressive, yet light mist. Then the three-note motif rang out again, but this time with an emphasis that announced that something was beginning. At the same time, it sounded like a warning that it would be recorded as an injustice on my part if I were not to recognize it, this motif, but this warning was superfluous, for the very reason I had come was for this passing scrap of rondo from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik , and to sit at my own table. I would say I recognized that I was still sitting at my own table were it not for the hazy impression that between “before” and “now” a sort of fissure had inserted itself, one that I seemed to have slept through, though I was now back on its trail. I say “slept through,” although I rather recollect something along the lines of a submersion, from which I am surfacing again — more than sleep. Memories of spicy yet thin air, and wafting within it but a hint of some amusing realness (the sort of thing that clings to the variegated decorations of national operas), and with which I am ultimately finding myself again, for within it sinks that now familiar, double, good-naturedly mocking travesty of Grock’s posture recalling his partner, which I am just now caressing with my still-blinking eyes, left right left right, as I surface.

Their sideways smiles say symmetrically, from that side: “We’re indivisible!”

From this: “We’re bound together!”

These smiles, because they’re sidelong, intersect right in front of my face. There they ignite a hotpoint: admittedly, I find it scintillating, but I see past it. Behind it, there’s a strange hand; it is sparingly twisting a doll that some other hand is toying with; I surmise that that playful hand belongs to me. The doll has fallen out of it; there’s a thump, as from under some heavy object, a Browning, let’s say, and just then I also hear: “Are you just going to keep playing forever, then? A person might say you’re dodging the bill that way.”

I rolled a glance across his visage, it wound around to her face and rolled across it as well. And again that peevish unease: Who is this third, this third, from their common likeness? The road leads there, but it’s blocked; in this bare blockade wall, however, there’s a crack, and through this crack dribbles a sort of meager certainty that between those two, Fuld and Giggles, there is a mysterious, yet definite, relationship. Yes, the man-stranger and the woman-stranger are Fuld and Giggles, but they are Fuld and Giggles, as it were, across mountains, across rivers. It’s them, through unheard-of forms. Now there can no longer be any doubt. He, having smiled, twisted his head: this sweet-toothed grimace that someone has inexpressibly, but importunately and quite vainly attempted to finish into an austere smile!

“ Escudero! ” say I.

He: “Escudero!”

But barely had he said it than he turned to face me and drew up so close that there could be no mistaking his intention to let it be understood that what would now occur would be — as I would say — utterly exceptional, for my sake, for me, as a sort of honor: and it was off with the mask. But with the locution “off with the mask” I’m not capturing the nature of what happened. For the change that came about was not, verily, as though he had tossed aside his mask or put on another; on the contrary, the new face that replaced the preceding one showed up with the same somehow swift accrual by which living-room magicians exchange their various neckties. Actually, it was more complicated: a whole array of visages were exchanged on his face (if one must put it this way), but so swiftly that I couldn’t manage to identify any one of them but the last; they flipped by no differently from pages of a block calendar quickly thumbed through, and in that nimble turning of the pages/faces dwelled, motionless, a pair of fixed, burning, almost inquisitorial eyes, somehow as if they were gradually burning through the top layer of those contemplated pages. But heavy lids suddenly fell upon those eyes, and the hard-braked contemplation blew over into a face that was so calm, so collected. .