Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by Jose Manuel Prieto

Author:Jose Manuel Prieto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

In the end, Azazello, emissary of Woland, the devil, gives MARGARITA a magical unguent that will enable her to fly. THELONIOUS, too, will one day fly, before LINDA’S astonished eyes.

MEMORY BUFFER. It’s an instant of seeing yourself from the outside, holding your breath while it happens. It allows us to postpone, for a thousandth of a second, the experience of the smiling face, and receive it steadily, free of the trembling of our hands. It allows for a minimum interval of certainty between the eye and the real image, a lapse of time that is sufficient to work it through entirely and render it in improved form, ready to be digested. It is a gulf of temporary oblivion, a subtle snare, a pass of the prestidigitator’s hand. (LINDA would film our entire journey through Crimea. I showed her how to do this with my camcorder, the latest model, complete with MEMORY BUFFER.)

“I want to show you how the instant camera works, too.” (The machine whirring in my hands.) “Look at this,” I said, handing her the shot. “Those are your legs.” (LINDA’S agile legs encased in jeans, slender and rounded, much preferable to the sight of them unclad: ugly prolongations of the torso finished off with feet, her toes joined to each other by a membrane: the mallard’s webbed feet.)

“Don’t you think they’re easier to see there, in the photo?”

I. “Stay, swift instant, you are so fair!” How difficult it is to put down on paper the deep sorrow, the sad evocation of unhappy love, that a song evokes when it moves us for a moment. It’s always while we’re living, never while we’re remembering the past, that we would like to be conceded the grace of an eternal moment. We can’t imagine that Goethe uttered this phrase as he read an obscure poet of the Ming dynasty in the solitude of his study. Only when we breathe happily beneath a blue sky do we want to halt time, to withstand every one of its tiniest recesses.

But time’s nature is inapprehensible; it remains deep in the background of our lives and, incapable of observing it objectively from the present moment, we know nothing, in the end, of its fierce transit. Only when we spend an idle moment leafing through old fashion magazines do we discover the degree to which that humanity, those others so different from ourselves, entered into contact with eternity. For the fashion that dictates a certain type of hairstyle—a feeling of well-being when attired in a made-to-measure suit, throatily tra-la-la-ing with all the exaltation of an opera singer, some tune from the last movie we saw—frees us from our fears about what was and what will be, to live in a perfect, orgiastic present.

a) In order to put past time—the old fashions—to the test, I have a scratched record with the songs I once enjoyed, a test-record. Each time I listen to it, there is, between today’s “I” and the song that only yesterday filled me to my brim, an immense space, difficult to conceive of.

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