Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [59]
Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies - the patient's lies to the psychoanalyst, for example - are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so; and the same will be true for those who eventually interpret our message. What I'm telling you now, Muller, I'm no longer telling you because instructed to do so by our superiors, but drawing on my own personal experience, speaking as colleague to colleague, man to man. Listen: the lie is the real information we have to pass on. Hence I didn't wish to deny myself a discreet use of lying where it didn't complicate the message, but on the contrary simplified it. When it came to information about myself in particular, I felt it legitimate to indulge in all kinds of details that are not true (I don't see how this could bother anyone). My life with Angela, for example: I described it as I would have liked it to be, a great love story, where Angela and I appear as two eternal lovebirds happy in the midst of every kind of adversity, passionate, faithful. It wasn't exactiy like that, Miiller: Angela married me out of convenience and immediately regretted it, our life was one long trail of sourness and subterfuge. But what does it matter what happened day by day? In the world memory Angela's image is definitive, perfect, nothing can taint it and I will always be the most enviable husband there ever was.
At first all I had to do was to apply some cosmetics to the data our everyday life provided. But there came the point when the facts I found myself confronted with as I watched Angela day by day (then spied on her, finally followed her) became increasingly contradictory and ambiguous, such as to justify the worst suspicions. What was I to do, Miiller? Muddy that image of Angela at once so clear, so easy to transmit, so loved and love-able, was I to make it incomprehensible, to darken the most brilliant light in all our archives? I didn't hesitate, day after day I eliminated these facts. But I was constantly afraid that some clue, some intimation, some hint from which one might deduce what she, what Angela did and was in this transitory life, might still be hovering around her definitive image. I spent the days in the laboratory, selecting, cancelling, omitting. I was jealous, Miiller: not jealous of the transitory Angela — that was a game I'd already lost — but jealous of that information-Angela who would live as long as the universe itself.
If the information-Angela was not to be contaminated, the first thing that must be done was to stop the living Angela from constandy superimposing herself on that image. It was then that Angela disappeared and all searches for her proved vain. It would be pointless, Miiller, for me to tell you now how I managed to get rid of the body piece by piece. Please, keep calm, these details are of no importance as far as our work is concerned, since in the world memory I remain that happy husband and later inconsolable widower you all know. But this didn't bring peace of mind: the information-Angela was still part of an information system where certain data might lend themselves to being interpreted — whether because of disturbances in transmission, or some malevolence on the part of the decoder — as ambiguous conjectures, insinuations, slander. I decided to destroy all references to people Angela could have had relationships with. I was sad about that, since there will now be no trace of some of our colleagues in the world memory, it will be as though they had never existed.