Intertextual Tourists

Clanks, bangs: rhythmic noises, offbeats? The wind? Howling underground motion.

On the left, supporting the flat rectangular frame, a single pillar: from leg knee? to head, a black & white (white) man in a black? suit, standing, holding three hardcover books; the top book, open. Partial doubles of the man and the books, projected on a nearby tiled? wall, are practically attached to his tall? figure. Slim. He in his twenties? – the man’s identity doesn’t matter – is reading attentively. Angry? Content: unknown. Title: unknown.

The words VINTAGE and WILLIAMS (black) sit next to the absorbed man’s head. Centered, in larger text, the word STONER (white) is stamped over his knee? leg ST and over the wall ONER; above the last pair of letters, a circle (red) with the blurb (white) ‘THE / GREATEST / NOVEL YOU’VE / NEVER READ’ / Sunday Times.

Missy Mazzoli (Victoire): A door in the dark starts to play, mixing with the sounds of the subway.

Abandoned on the seat of a Brooklyn-bound train at midnight, a decade ago, 2013: a paperback. Ignored. And I bent down to grab Stoner; why not?, how could I not?, the greatest novel. Little marks of manipulation. Someone who read a bit and didn’t like it? Someone who was enjoying the story, but: a sudden phone call?, but: an emergency? Someone who, at least entirely, never read it? Or read it afterwards – a different copy?, a different edition? Anyway: the previous owner’s identity doesn’t matter; it was my turn now. Leaning on a pole, posture echoing the cover man’s, I opened it: read a bit; a bit more?, was hooked, read more– and, beyond Brooklyn, I couldn’t forget its hidden wedding ring.

The music’s volume decreases at 1’13” – and keeps decreasing, 1’14,” 1’15”; until, at 1’21,” Silence.

In the 1930s, William Stoner, a married middle-aged professor, and Katherine Driscoll, a young instructor, colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri, in love, travel from Columbia to a resort village in the outlying mountains of the great Ozark range: the Christmas holiday, an opportunity; the impossible? relationship configuring itself uninterrupted for ten days,

for three pages.

Three pages of Stoner, fewer in fact, that develop carefully with the book’s characteristic bitter beauty, constant bleak tenderness; a passage created under John Williams’s clear magnifying glass (his creation: a pattern of select details, or trivialities?, a pattern of select passionate nothings?, which appear, inflate and quickly take on the weight of Monuments).

Stoner and Driscoll sounds monumental – intimate; Stoner and Driscoll, bodies warmed by their own natural warmth, make love, wander in the woods despite the cold and snow, drink coffee (black?), have meals in their cabin (what kind of food?), sit in front of the fireplace and talk (about what?) and are silent and watch the flames play intricately upon the logs and watch the play of firelight upon each other’s faces.

On their last morning, before they go back to Columbia, Katherine straightened the furniture and cleaned the place with slow care. She took off the wedding band she had worn and wedged it in a crevice between the wall and the fireplace. She smiled self-consciously. “I wanted,” she said, “to leave something of our own here; something I knew would stay here, as long as this place stays. Maybe it’s silly.”

The wedding band wasn’t mentioned before. Just an unexpected element that, out of the blue, grew under John Williams’s magnifying glass – to fade? It won’t be mentioned again. (And the impossible affair will, of course, eventually collapse.) An undescribed ring, ephemeral symbol of a fake union, hidden in the core of a profound story composed with apparent simplicity. I can’t forget.

It pleases me, once in a while, to fantasize that such a ring, invisible enigma, remains (almost a hundred years later) in place. It pleases me, once in a while, to fantasize that such a ring was lost forever: helpless: perhaps in a violent demolition of the cabin, of the whole Lake Ozark resort village. And I won’t allow myself to spoil all those potential daydreams by typing “Lake Ozark resort village”, in quotes, into the Google search bar. Was it / Is it an actual resort? Is it listed on Booking.com? I won’t allow myself, I won’t.

Because it pleases me, once in a while, to fantasize that such a ring has been, in the end, at some point (when?), found Look, ***, I found a wedding ring. By another couple in love?; clandestine as well? Would they be: real people? Would they be: other characters? Intertextual tourists, from different fiction; from different languages? Portuguese? From some language I can’t understand? Ancient? Distant fiction? New fiction?

Way beyond Brooklyn.

A strong smell of coffee (black) fills the room. One of the characters, an inert heavy shadow. Cast beside the blossoming anonymous woman who, now, detail by detail, triviality by triviality, nothing by nothing, I begin to imagine –

a mere outline, to be honest;

not glamorously blossoming: an outline with faint indigo circles around gray eyes, sobbing The reason?; reason: unknown over sorrows and irreversible defeats, trying to pronounce my name, Phil-i-pe, secret whisper from thin lips, grasping the ring with a hand borrowed from cummings No, I’ve tried this cummings trick before, this “nobody, not even the rain” trick, grasping the ring with a hand crisscrossed by crazy paths (nowhere bound: maze of dead ends), wearing indigo leggings and a gray T-shirt Blank field for life advice?, for a menacing sentence?, barefoot, raw marionette in front of the fireplace;

a few garments, meaningless features (her identity doesn’t matter, to be honest) –

: lonely character, you

(condemned to the worst of solitudes, to eternal imminence, to nonexistence)

who I’m sorry? I’ll never write. Goodbye.