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I think I know, now, what I was trying to do. I was trying to subdue the
city by turning it into a projection of my own growing pains. What solipsistic
arrogance! The city, the largest city in the world, the city designed to suit
not one of my European expectations, this city presents the foreigner with a
mode of life that seems to him to have the enigmatic transparency, the
indecipherable clarity, of dream. And it is a dream he could, himself, never
have dreamed. The stranger, the foreigner, thinks he is control; but he has
been precipitated into somebody else's dream.
You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen.
I had been attracted to the city first because I suspected it contained
enormous histrionic resources. I was always rummaging in the dressing-up box
of the heart for suitable appearances to adopt in the city. That was the way I
maintained my defences for, at that time, I always used to suffer a great deal
if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the
everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to
echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced
experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of
it -- the Bovary syndrome. I was always imagining other things that could have
been happening, instead, and so I always felt cheated, always dissatisfied.
Always dissatisfied, even if, like a perfect heroine, I wandered,
weeping, on a forlorn quest for a lost lover through the aromatic labyrinth of
alleys. And wasn't I in Asia? Asia! But, even though I lived there, it always
seemed far away from me. It was as if there were glass between me and the
world. But I could see myself perfectly well on the other side of the glass.
There I was, walking up and down, eating meals, having conversations, in love,
indifferent, and so on. But all the time I was pulling the strings of my own
puppet; it was this puppet who was moving about on the other side of the
glass. And I eyed the most marvellous adventures with the bored eye of the
agent with the cigar watching another audition. I tapped out the ash and asked
of events: "What else can you do?"
So I attempted to rebuild the city according to the blueprint in my
imagination as a backdrop to the plays in my puppet theatre, but it sternly
refused to be so rebuilt; I was only imagining it had been so rebuilt. On the
night I came back to it, however hard I looked for the one I loved, she could
not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect
stranger who fell into step beside her and asked why she was crying. She went
with him to an unambiguous hotel with a mirror on the ceiling and lascivious
black lace draped round a palpably illicit bed. His eyes were shaped like
sequins. All night long, a thin, pale, sickle moon with a single star pendant
at its nether tip floated upon the rain that pitter-pattered against the
windows and there was a clockwork whirring of cicadas. From time to time, the
windbell dangling from the eaves let out an exquisitely mournful tinkle.
None of the lyrical eroticism of this sweet, sad, moon night of summer
rain had been within my expectations; I had half expected he would strangle
me. My sensibility wilted under the burden of response. My sensibility
foundered under the assault on my senses. My imagination had been pre-empted.
The room was a box of oiled paper full of the echoes of the rain. After
the light was out, as we lay together, I could still see the single shape of
our embrace in the mirror above me, a marvellously unexpected conjunction cast
at random by the enigmatic kaleidoscope of the city. Our pelts were stippled
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with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a
mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who
made love in that hotel anonymous. The mirror annihilated time, place and
person; at the consecration of this house, the mirror had been dedicated to
the reflection of chance embraces. Therefore it treated flesh in an exemplary
fashion, with charity and indifference.
The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers
whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance
embrace, the accidental. During the durationless time we spent making love, we
were not ourselves, whoever that might have been, but in some sense the ghosts
of ourselves. But the selves we were not, the selves of our own habitual
perceptions of ourselves, had a far more insubstantial substance than the
reflections we were. The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto
unconsidered notion of myself as I. Without any intention of mine, I had been
defined by the action reflected in the mirror. I beset me. I was the subject
of the sentence written on the mirror. I was not watching it. There was
nothing whatsoever beyond the surface of the glass. Nothing kept me from the
fact, the act; I had been precipitated into knowledge of the real conditions
of living.
Mirrors are ambiguous things. The bureaucracy of the mirror issues me
with a passport to the world; it shows me my appearance. But what use is a
passport to an armchair traveller? Women and mirrors are in complicity with
one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch, the
action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my
appearance. But this mirror refused to conspire with me; it was like the first
mirror I'd ever seen. It reflected the embrace beneath it without the least
guile. All it showed was inevitable. But I myself could never have dreamed it.
I saw the flesh and the mirror but I could not come to terms with the
sight. My immediate response to it was to feel I'd acted out of character. The
fancy-dress disguise I'd put on to suit the city had betrayed me to a room and
a bed and a modification of myself that had no business at all in my life, not
in the life I had watched myself performing.
Therefore I evaded the mirror. I scrambled out of its arms and sat on
the edge of the bed and lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one.
The rain beat down. My demonstration of perturbation was perfect in every
detail, just like the movies. I applauded it. I was gratified the mirror had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]