If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino Page B

this moment, or did she hear the beginning? Did she enter silently, without knocking? Was she already here, hidden among these shelves? (She came
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    here to hide, Irnerio said. They come here to do unspeakable things, Uzzi-Tuzii said). Or is she an apparition summoned by the spell released through the words of the professor-sorcerer?
    He continues his recitation, Uzzi-Tuzii, and shows no sign of surprise at the presence of the new listener, as if she had always been there. Nor does he react with a start when she, hearing him pause longer than the other times, asks him, "And then?"
    The professor snaps the book shut. "Then nothing. Leaning from the steep slope breaks off here. Having written these first pages of his novel, Ukko Ahti sank into a deep depression which, in the space of a few years, led him to three unsuccessful suicide attempts and one that succeeded. The fragment was published in the collection of his posthumous writings, along with scattered verses, an intimate diary, and his notes for an essay on the incarnation of Buddha. Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any plan or sketch explaining how Ahti intended to develop the plot. Though incomplete, or perhaps for this very reason, Leaning from the steep slope is the most representative work of Cimmerian prose, for what it reveals and even more for what it hides, for its reticence, withdrawal, its disappearing...."
    The professor's voice seems about to die away. You crane your neck, to make sure he is still there, beyond the bookcase-partition that separates him from your vision, but you are no longer able to glimpse him; perhaps he has ducked into the hedge of academic publications and bound collections of reviews, growing thinner and thinner until he can slip into the interstices greedy for dust, perhaps overwhelmed by the erasing destiny that looms over the object of his studies, perhaps engulfed by the empty chasm of the brusque interruption of the novel. On the edge of this chasm you would like to take your stand, supporting Ludmilla or clinging to her; your hands try to grasp her hands....
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    "Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...." The professor's voice goes up and down; where has he got to? Perhaps he is rolling around beneath the desk, perhaps he is hanging himself from the lamp in the ceiling.
    "Continue where?" you ask, perched on the edge of the precipice. "Beyond what?"
    "Books are the steps of the threshold.... All Cimmerian authors have passed it.... Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond....Listen...."
    But you are no longer listening to anything, the two of you. You have also disappeared, flattened in a corner, one clinging to the other. Is this your answer? Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies—is this the premise you wish Uzzi-Tuzii would take into account?—then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain; then...
    "Cimmerian books are all unfinished," Uzzi-Tuzii sighs, "because they continue beyond ... in the other language, in the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer...."
    "Believe.... Why believe? I like to read, really to read." It is Ludmilla who is speaking like this, with conviction and warmth. She is seated opposite the professor, dressed in a simple, elegant fashion, in light colors. Her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her, dismisses the egocentric abyss of the suicide's novel that ends by sinking