The Shadow of Memory. Bernard Comment

his muted voice. I wondered what this stranger could be after, his overwhelming silhouette backlit by the ceiling lights. He had leaned further forward, right next to me, I smelled something musty, the smell of decay, rain on dust probably, especially in his mouth, a real stink that made me turn my head a bit, warding it off with my hand. His gaze, focused, caught one of my eyes, held it intensely for a few seconds then abandoned its prey, seized the other, then sometimes both at the same time, as if to bore into me and then absorb me, as if to put a spell on me. He examined the two volumes I was consulting as well as my tools, he must have been disturbed by the miniature technology. One of the librarians, obliterated in his shadow, tried to explain what was going on, but the old man wouldn’t give him a chance, blocked his way, soon speaking at a more than conversational volume, he would have ended up yelling, screaming I think, if our neighbors, as well as the uncomfortable employee, hadn’t quickly made him quiet down.

      “Let you have these manuscripts? But I’m working on them, these exact ones, to . . . to . . . put them in . . . store them in my memory. I’m trying to make sense of them, it isn’t very . . . and it’s the only day that . . . No, really . . . And I don’t have an alternative project, I can’t just move on to something else.” It wasn’t even ten o’clock! Then Robert wheeled out arguments about age, fatigue, illness, how hard it was for him to get around, he didn’t live in the center of town so it was a real expedition on foot. He’d have to come back, all that wasted energy, almost an entire day, whereas I was young, it would be less of a problem for me, and a whole bunch of other stuff like that. His tone of voice kept changing unpredictably. Soon I just didn’t know what to say in response. I gave up. He’d taken the manuscripts in question and gone to a table nearby, also off to the side. Actually, it was the librarian himself who had carried the volumes and, all smiles, bowing and scraping, very considerately set him up. As for me, I still had my laptop, very handy, but nothing to put into it. Blank. I could have gone back home to Mattilda. How happy she’d have been! She always loved surprises, anything unexpected. Which is why she had a hard time putting up with my orderly, methodical temperament, my endless obsession with work, nights devoured by my appetite for knowledge. Yes, I could have gone back to be with Mattilda. Everything would have been simpler, I would have gotten some points and everything else would have remained as before. But no! I went through the main card catalogue, took down a few new shelving numbers and references in order to do some follow-up work. I also flipped through the journals that were on display, as if to kill some time.

      The old man stood there in his raincoat in that huge, overheated room; bent over and rapidly copying things down in a little notebook, he was no doubt perspiring terribly. He’d never even taken his cap, or rather beret, off. Obviously just passing through. He’d carefully closed the disputed volumes rather quickly and now seemed to be thinking about something. He probably noticed that I was watching him. When I headed toward the checkout desk and then the exit he followed me so we then met up again in the entrance hall. A bit of awkwardness, hesitation. He thanked me, rather coldly. I didn’t know what attitude I should take, how to follow up, and we were about to go our separate ways. But suddenly he asked me, in somewhat reproachful tones, why I was reading those particular manuscripts. What possible interest could I have in those accounts of voyages with no literary value, in dated diplomatic papers, boring, full of descriptions of works that had, more likely than not, vanished or themselves been judged to be minor. How was I even aware that they existed? He gave the impression of being sincerely surprised, dumbfounded, as if confronted by some truly insoluble mystery or aberration. I couldn’t think how to answer him, or rather I carefully avoided admitting to him that it was all by chance. Chronology, Mannerism, and the letter P as in Pontormo. A strange guy, the gifted student of the best studios in the great Florentine adventure that was nearing its end. I’d been deep in his story for several weeks and very much liked the few pictures of his I’d seen. Of everything that I’d crammed in, that is to say almost two centuries’ worth now, piles of diskettes, he was my favorite, Pontormo, even more than Michelangelo and the other great names. But I couldn’t have said why, since I’d only read Vasari’s not very precise text on the subject. As for the manuscript that seemed of such concern to Robert, I’d found it mentioned in a bibliographical index that was itself pretty old, where it was described as being one of the rare serious and accurate documents about some frescos by Pontormo that had since vanished, although some preliminary sketches for them had survived that I’d been able to see and found fascinating, intriguing. What more could I tell him?

      At the moment he was bombarding me with questions: had I had a chance to admire the Visitation, the Deposition? And that wonderful Annunciation, the incredible, casual turn of the angel’s head, the flawless, veiled expression of the Virgin. Had I spent the requisite amount of time admiring them? As if, my friend, I had time to go in person to museums, chapels! If I went through every painter like that I wouldn’t go fast enough, and there was still the problem that in order to appreciate and benefit from seeing something in real life, you had to know something, be cultivated. But, as for me I didn’t know anything, not yet. He finally asked me what it was about Pontormo that I liked. I’d never bothered to justify my tastes or the things I found interesting. So I suggested: the colors. Those oranges and greens. Then I added: the drawings, brilliant yet subtle. The ones I’d seen again that very morning came to mind. Faced with silence on his part I threw out another idea that I found meaningful. Mannerism . . . finally, it would have been possible . . . a key moment . . . a kind of memory of painting . . . a first synthesis. Several aspects, often contradictory, inherited from the past . . . and put together in an attempt to attain an ideal beauty. Yes, painting with an active memory! But Robert interrupted me in a loud, resounding voice. He suggested first going to get a coffee, or rather, ice cream. We’d be able to chat more comfortably.

      We hadn’t yet left the big reception room of the library when he began going into things at length. “Ah! Pontormo’s sketches! The ones for the choir dedicated to San Lorenzo, his final work . . . Luckily we still have those! The ones of the Flood are the wildest, with their clusters of bodies, coiling, writhing spirals, not a single bit of free air in a great mass of undulation, nothing but an agglomeration of flesh twisting in unlikely ways, and those crazed expressions, eyes that are lost in huge black sockets but still look at us, look at us. And bear witness, perhaps. Dazzling intuition, that in a flood bodies would be deformed as they became swollen by the water, the people, huge interlocking and blistered pouches, are caught at the very last moment before they burst. Those lines, those shadows have to be closely examined, the dispersed limbs decoded, the feeble sway, faces distraught, carried away in a whirlpool of postures that burst apart, where any system to sort them out collapses. The flood! That’s where we’ll find ourselves, young man . . . Inevitably. Well, did you know that that damn Pontormo, in order to observe, in the best way conceivable, shall we say, the capacities of a sunken body, to test its elasticity, its receptiveness, to experience it completely, to see the results of this whole flood business, when everything drowns and drifts off with the final tide, yes, just in order to admire the process, he preserved cadavers in troughs filled with water where he soaked them long enough to stink up the neighborhood with the stench of his experiments . . . There you have it! That’s a pretty peculiar way of working, don’t you think? One way to arrive at an outcome, meeting the problem head-on without flinching. In those days they weren’t too sensitive about hygiene, not yet having discovered any of our contemporary medical certainties, let alone the pseudo-truths of science! In those days you could certainly get away with just using your imagination alone to depict the sloughed-off mortal coils of your fellow men—people would swallow it! What, you never read about that? Pontormo’s astonishing laboratory? And yet, there are severable credible sources that attest to it, there was even some talk among ecclesiastics at the time. Because the church, being both Pontormo’s sponsor and the venue in which his work was executed, was concerned on both counts. Just imagine the scene! On the one hand there was the anxious clergy, suspicious. On the other, the already aged painter, sick and nauseated as often as not, obsessed by what he eats and drinks, fearful of excess, afraid he too will explode. He can feel it coming, death, he’s intrigued by it. Absorbed by his frescoes, huge, interminable, the job he’s been working to complete for twelve years, hidden from sight, he no longer meets with anyone. Relentless worker, that fellow! And when he goes home at night, there too he shuts himself in and plunges into his experiments, moving his cadavers around with a big stick, regrouping them, stirring