Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [94]
In the end I was so disheartened that not even the faces in the mirror were any help. The mirror wouldn't reflect my face any more and not even a shadow of Ottilia, just an expanse of scattered stones as though on the surface of the moon.
To strengthen my character I took up archery. My thoughts and actions must become like arrows that dart through the air along the invisible line that ends in an exact point, the centre of all centres. But my aim was no good. My arrows never hit the bull's eye.
The target seemed as far away as another world, a world that was all precise lines, sharp colours, regular, geometric, harmonious. The inhabitants of that world must make only precise and sudden movements, with nothing vague about them; for them there could be only straight lines, compass-drawn circles, set square corners …
The first time I saw Corinna, I realized that that perfect world was made for her, while I was still excluded.
Corinna would shoot her bow and wham! wham! wham! one after another the arrows thudded into the centre.
‘Are you a champion?’
Of the world.’
‘You know how to bend your bow in so many different ways and every time the arrow's trajectory takes it right to the target. How do you do it?’
‘You think that I'm here and the target there. No: I'm both here and there, I'm the archer and I'm the target that draws the archer's arrow to it, and I'm the arrow that flies and the bow that releases the arrow.’
I don't understand.’
‘If you become like me, you will understand.’
‘Can I learn too?’
I can teach you.’
In the first lesson Corinna said to me: To give your eye the steadiness you lack you must look at the target a long time, intensely. Just look at it, stare, until you lose yourself in it, until you convince yourself there's nothing else in the world than that target, and that you are in the centre of the centre.’
I gazed at the target. The sight of it had always communicated a feeling of certainty; but now, the more I looked, the more this certainty was overcome by doubts. There were moments when the red areas seemed to rise in relief against the green, others when the green areas seemed to be higher while the red sank back. Gaps opened up between the lines, precipices, chasms, the centre was in the bottom of a gorge or on the tip of a steeple, the circles opened up dizzying perspectives. I felt that a hand would come out from between the lines of the pattern, an arm, a person … Ottilia! I immediately thought. But I was quick to banish the idea. It was Corinna I had to follow, not Ottilia, her image was enough to make the target dissolve like a soap bubble.
In the second lesson Corinna said: ‘It's when it relaxes that the bow releases the arrow, but to do that it must first be properly tensed. If you want to become precise as a bow you have to learn two things: to concentrate yourself within yourself and to leave every tension outside.’
I tensed and relaxed myself like a bowstring. I went wham! but then I also went whim! and whum!, I vibrated like a harp, the vibrations spread through the air, they opened parentheses of emptiness whence the winds sprung. Between the whim! and the whum! a hammock was swinging. I climbed spirally screwing myself through space and it was Ottilia I saw rocking herself in the hammock amongst arpeggios. But the vibrations faded. I fell.
In the third lesson Corinna said to me: ‘Imagine you are an arrow and run towards the target.’
I ran, I cut through the air, I persuaded myself I was like an arrow. But the arrows I was like were arrows that wandered off in every direction but the right one. I ran to gather the fallen arrows. I pressed on into desolate, stony wastes. Was it my own reflection in a mirror? Was it the moon?
Amid the stones I found my blunted arrows, stuck in the sand, twisted, featherless. And there in the midst of them all was Ottilia. She was walking