The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (7 page)

Bradley took charge. All he needed was one look at those floppy remains to know what was going on. He did not immediately tell the goatherd, who found out by overhearing Bradley’s conversation with the group’s scientist. The goat had drunk “the dehydrating water,” which was the real threat that had propelled the North American spies to act.

They now had to precisely retrace the goat’s steps the night before in order to find where it had drunk. The goatherd was the only one who could possibly carry out such an undertaking, and they sent him off to bed right away so he would be well rested and ready to go at dawn.
Th
ey spent the rest of the night preparing the equipment they would use in their search and to deal with the samples they would take. And something more. Now they had proof that the enemy had managed to synthesize the dehydrating water, and it was urgent that they neutralize this achievement, which would require the use of force.

These nocturnal preparations lasted a while, and one by one the members of the group went to bed to get some sleep. The camp they had set up consisted of several inflatable tents connected by tubular passageways, all lit by a dim, silvery light. An aerial shot made the compound look like a globular excrescence of the mountain under the starry sky.

Finally, Bradley and his scientific consultant, also an older man, remained alone in the command room. Bradley, his face showing obvious signs of exhaustion, took a bottle of whisky out of a trunk, opened it, and poured some into a couple of glasses. In the intimacy thereby created and portrayed, the tone of their conversation became less practical. The alcohol relaxed them; and well it might, for that first whisky was followed by a second, then a third. They discussed the profession they had both chosen and practiced their entire lives, the profession that had brought them to this remote corner of the planet, just as it had brought them to so many others before. But, they wondered, had they chosen it?
Th
e scientific consultant said that science had been his true vocation, and that if he had ended up as a spy, it was due to circumstances; among those circumstances he included the budgetary cuts to laboratories and research centers, the vertiginous rise in the salaries at government agencies, the responsibility a citizen felt when faced with threats to the free world, and, in order not to externalize all the causes, a lack of creative talent to pursue his vocation. Bradley agreed: his case offered an almost perfect parallel. His original vocation had been art, and he had also been unable to stick to it with the required heroism. But he consoled himself with the thought that he had not done so badly after all. And, the alcohol having already loosened his tongue, he developed a theory about espionage as an art
and
a science. According to him, it was a qualitative activity. It didn’t matter if a lot or a little was achieved, that is, if a lot or a little information was collected — what mattered was its quality; it could be minimal — a word, a letter, a number — but it had to be good. Like expert appraisers, they wandered the globe in search of this precious element, their eyes growing sharper and sharper with the years.
Th
ey were not searching for a vein of gold, except as a metaphor. The difference was that they were searching for something that resided in a mind, even if it was also recorded on a piece of paper or as an object. And as that mind participated in other minds, and these in still others, the search expanded . . .

He could illustrate it with an everyday situation, like choosing a barber. For a man even moderately interested in looking good — in other words, everybody — the choice of someone to cut one’s hair was a great minor problem that was generally made haphazardly, and with unsatisfactory results, because of one’s ignorance of the mysteries of the guild. A guide for the perplexed might be based on the answer to the following question: Who cut the hair of barbers? Even the most skilled barber might have difficulty cutting his own hair, and though not completely impossible, barbers were sworn enemies of the “do-it-yourself-cut”; and surely they would want to have the best cut possible in order to make a good impression on their own clients. And since barbers knew the rubric, and knew their colleagues, they would choose the best one available in a given city or neighborhood. Not the most expensive or the most famous, as would someone ignorant of the field, but really the best one, even if he worked out of a filthy hovel and created masterpieces on the heads of truck drivers and pensioners. So, all you had to do was find out where any barber whatsoever had his hair cut and that would be the first clue.

Next, Bradley continued, a clue had to be followed; it was not a point of arrival but rather one of departure. Logic dictated that this second barber would have his hair cut by a third, and the third by a fourth, and the chain would keep getting longer because the optimal in human resources was always one step away.

To start this chain one had to begin with any barber, preferably a humble neighborhood barber, not too young (he wouldn’t yet know enough) or too old (he would have lost interest in his own hair). One could strike up a relationship with him, become his customer, engage him in conversation, and at an opportune moment ask him, casually, where he went to have his hair cut. It was the only reasonable and viable method, but according to Bradley, we had to reject it out of hand, for many reasons. But if we rejected the only reasonable and viable method, what was left? Vigilance, follow-up. All we had to do was think about it for a minute to see the insurmountable practical difficulties. Who would spend months working to obtain such a trivial piece of information? We would have to pay a private detective, who would need assistants, perhaps also pay bribes, and, moreover, take certain precautions because a spy might be subject to legal reprisals for violations of privacy. And the result, laborious and expensive, would be merely the first link; it would all have to be started over with a second, then a third, a fourth . . .

One had to admit, however, that it was possible.
Th
e two of them, with all their experience, and with the experience of having survived, were living proof.
Th
at ordinary man who combed through the urban labyrinth to find the Grail of scissors was the image of the destiny they had chosen, or that had chosen them. The fleeting nature of information leaped from head to head, and resignation to imperfection was merely another maneuver in the search for perfection. How ascetic
espionage was!

This simile, like any well-wrought allegory, allowed for further expansion.
Th
at chain, which would lead through its series of human links to the best of all possible barbers, could be cut (precisely, be cut!) before it had gotten very far if one of the barbers in the chain was bald and had no need for the services of a colleague. Or, by mere accident, for example, if barber number X found a colleague who created true disasters on the heads of his clients, but who could cut his, and only his, hair perfectly because of the particular shape of his head or the nature of his curls. (Though in this case, the chain would not need to be cut, because that defective barber who by accident got it right would also need to find a barber to cut his own hair.) Or, it could be cut if two barbers simply cut each others’ hair, whereby the chain would end in a little circle, a “ringlet,” to use the terminology of the profession. (
Th
e circle could also be large, and by carrying things to their ultimate consequences, could “link up” all the barbers in the world.)
Th
ey had — Bradley reminded his friend, who nodded with a sad smile — lived through all these possibilities, and those “cuts” had left their marks on them, like scars on their brains.

In spite of my best intentions to move along quickly and sum things up so I could get to my point as soon as possible, I took my time in this detailed account of their conversation, and when I reconstructed ours at night, I went over it again, word by word. It was my favorite moment in the movie, the one that vindicated it, even if the producers had included it merely as filler, or to create a moment of calm to contrast with the vertigo of the action that for them and the mass audience justified the movie. The logic Bradley brandished, though ingenious, was really quite off the wall. But I liked that there had been a conversation, an exercise in intelligence between friends, which was similar to ours. The whisky was a good detail. It placed things in a different dimension, which is where things should be.

Quickly, slowly — what did these words mean in this context? Events happened at the velocity reality dictated they should happen. It was only in the telling that they could be sped up or stopped altogether, and there were probably people who transformed their lives into stories in order to be able to change speeds. But thought moved forward at a static pace, always doubling back upon itself to stop better, or rather to find better reasons to stop.
Th
ose of us who had made the voluptuousness of thought the raison d’être of our lives, like my friend and I, watched the velocities from the outside, as a spectacle. That’s why we could enjoy, even for a moment, the cheap spectacle of a movie on television. In a certain way one could say that at the peak of prejudice against popular culture, one ceased to have prejudices and no longer cared about anything.

Bradley and his old friend did not enjoy the calm of their conversation for very long. For them, too, the rush of fiction came to interrupt the syllogisms of reality. A noise coming from the nylon tubes warned them that they were being attacked by electric weapons. In fact, the young agents who were sleeping were awoken one after the other with hundred-thousand volt charges in their blood and died with their hair standing on end. The two of them organized an emergency rescue mission, which could not save those who were already dead. They connected a portable converter made of optical fibers, booted up the software, and when they turned on the siren (the maneuver took only a few seconds), all the loose electricity in the atmosphere discharged in the generation of inoffensive images.
Th
e tents exploded in a cloud of transparencies, but they managed to escape. They ducked and rolled into the darkness, and when they stood up, they took off running desperately through the mountainous terrain. They were chased by gigantic bearded Cossacks shooting streams of liquid fire at them from their sleds.
Th
e scientific consultant, who was panting like an overweight Labrador retriever, took the time to tell his friend that the Cossacks’ ammunition was made of exo-phosphorus, the latest hurrah in incendiary fuel, which burned only on the outside, not on the inside, but this made it no less destructive, quite the contrary.

They received unexpected help from the mountain owls, huge phantom-like creatures who, frightened by the noise made by the sled, took off in flight and intercepted the exo-phosphorus. As the fire wasn’t interested in their internal organs, they kept flying, though lower down (the flames must have weighed them down). They were so bright that they blinded the Ukrainian ogres, who crashed into trees, giving the fugitives an added advantage.

By pure chance, Bradley came across the entrance to an ancient and abandoned coal mine. They entered its underground galleries without thinking twice. They used a burning owl feather sprayed with exo-phosphorus to light their way, for it gave off an intense white light. Calm was restored; here, they were safe. It was as if they could pick up their conversation where they had left off, now no longer in the inflatable tent surrounded by espionage equipment but rather in the galleries of an underground coal mine filled with feldspar and old lichen. I liked that touch, because it suggested that in reality conversations are never interrupted, they merely change scenarios, and change subjects, and in order to bring about that change the interlocutors have to risk their lives.

They ended up in a huge cavern, the limits of which they could not even see, and they approached a lake of still water. Along the banks, magnetite dust had formed piles of black foam. A regular “glop glop” in the deep underground silence made them peer out along the surface of the water; there they saw floating medallions made of a viscous substance, which seemed to be breathing. Taking every precaution, they picked one up and examined it in the light of the owl feather.
Th
is was the toxic algae, which they had been looking for in vain until that moment and by chance had found where least expected. Excited, having totally forgotten the danger they had just confronted, the scientific consultant analyzed the viscous material, mentally reviewed the bibliography, gasped a “No, it can’t be!” which refused to cross the bounds of rationality, then resigned himself to a perplexed and awed “But it is!” By revealing their secrets, the toxic algae opened up a path until then concealed from science, which gave access to the best kept secrets of the universe, because in reality they were not algae but rather retro-algae, vegetal mutants with nervous systems, which formed a bridge between life and death. He wondered if he was dreaming.

With a little effort on the part of the viewer, I said, the oneiric atmosphere became palpable. I pointed out to my friend and perfected the argument ever so slightly alone in bed, that when one watches movies in the theater, one’s concentration, enhanced by the darkness and the fact itself of going to the theater, takes one into the fiction completely and makes one cease to think of it as fiction. On the contrary, at home, when watching movies on television, one inevitably does not enter it completely. A part of one’s consciousness remains outside, contemplating the game of fiction and reality, and here the emergence of a critical sensibility becomes inevitable. It ceases to be a dream one is dreaming alone and becomes the dream that others are dreaming. It is not so much an issue of finding mistakes in the construction or the logic (that would be too easy) but rather the birth of a certain nostalgia, of partially glimpsed worlds, within reach, but still inaccessible . . .