Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [69]
So this is a piece of data the programme will have to take into account: Belindo doesn't knife but prefers to strangle-, and he can't be strangled, only if threatened with a gun can he be tied up and gagged; once tied up and gagged anything can happen to him, he can even be raped, by the ruttish widow, or the impassive model, or the eccentric youth.
Let's start laying down exclusions and orders of precedence. Someone may first threaten someone with a gun, then tie them up and gag them it would be to say the least superfluous to tie up someone first then threaten them afterwards. On the other hand someone knifing or strangling who at the same time threatened with a gun, would be engaging in a gesture at once awkward and unnecessary, unforgivable. Someone who wins over the object of his or her desires by seduction has no need to rape that person; and vice versa. Someone inciting someone else to prostitution may have previously seduced or raped them; doing so afterwards would be a poindess waste of time and energy. One may snoop on someone in order to blackmail them, but if you have already slandered them then further scandalous revelations can frighten them no more; hence the person slandenng is not interested in snooping, nor has any further reasons for blackmail. Someone knifing one victim may well strangle another, or incite them to suicide, but it is unlikely that the three deadly deeds could be committed at the expense of the same person.
Following this method allows me to rewrite my flow-chart: to establish a system of exclusions that will enable the computer to discard billions of incongruous combinations, to reduce the number of plausible concatenations, to approach a selection of that solution which will present itself as true.
But will we ever get to that? Half I'm concentrating on constructing algebraic models where factors and functions are anonymous and interchangeable, thus dismissing the faces and gestures of those four phantoms from my thoughts; and half I am identifying with the characters, evoking the scenes in a mental film packed with fades and metamorphoses. Maybe it's around the word drugging that the cog that drives all the others turns: at once my mind associates the word with the pasty face of the last Inigo of an illustrious stock; if drugging meant the reflexive drugging oneself, there would be no problem here: it's highly likely that the boy took drugs, something that does not concern me; but the transitive sense of drugging implies a drugger and a person drugged, the latter consenting, unknowing or compelled.
It is equally likely that Inigo gets himself so high on drugs that he tries to preach stupefaction to others; I imagine spindly cigarettes being passed from his hand to Ogiva's or old Widow Roessler's. Is it the young nobleman who transforms the lonely boarding house into a smoke-filled den of kaleidoscopic hallucinations? Or is it the landlady who lures him there in order to exploit his inclination toward states of ecstasy? Perhaps it is Ogiva who procures the drug for the old opium addict, Roessler, and Inigo who, while snooping on her, discovers where she hides it and bursts in on her threatening her with a gun or blackmailing her; Widow Roessler shouts to Belindo for help, then slanders Inigo accusing him of having seduced and prostituted Ogiva, the Uzbek's chaste passion, at which the wrestler takes his revenge by strangling the boy; to get out of trouble the landlady now has no alternative but to incite the wrestler to suicide, not a problem since the insurance company will pay the damages, but Belindo, in for a penny in for a pound, rapes Ogiva, ties and gags her and sets fire to the obliterating pyre.
Slowly does it: no point in imagining I can beat the electronic brain to it. The drug might just as well have to do with