00.31 — God Undresses Himself of Nothingness

00.30 — COSMOLOGICAL SOURCES

Impossible date · Rome / uncertain place

Before the light there is a nakedness. Afterward, a stain.

I write this because I keep finding the same image.

I do not know whether I have already written it.

Perhaps.

Some things return not because you have forgotten them but because they have not yet finished being said.

A painter draws a circle and places a point at its center.

The navel.

That is what he says.

I do not know whether he means the body he paints or the painting itself. Perhaps there is no difference. Until the point exists, the surface can be anything. Afterward there is already an up and a down. An inside and an outside.

A body.

The painter has contaminated nothingness.

Not with matter.

With desire.

In Rome, during the elevation, a priest imagines that the Big Bang was the moment when God undressed himself of nothingness.

I like the idea too much, and that is why I distrust it.

God does not create first.

First he takes something off.

A garment that is neither black nor white because colors do not yet exist.

Nothingness.

Then he covers himself with an almost transparent mantle.

Time.

So thin that the wound can be seen beneath it.

The priest holds the host up to the light.

Blood seeps through the mantle.

Then stars.

One after another.

Not placed.

Not designed.

They appear like stains spreading across a wet cloth.

The priest lowers his hands.

Mass continues.

No one has seen anything.

But the image remains.

Perhaps that is all an image can do.

Remain.

Farid and I are facing the charmer.

Again.

This is one of those scenes whose repetition is beginning to worry me.

We are fourteen.

Or fifteen.

The difference does not matter, and yet every time I write I change the age.

It is hot.

There is a white wall.

The snake remains inside a basket.

The man does not play music.

He looks at us.

That does remain identical.

He looks at us.

Farid is beside me, and for a few seconds I have the impression that he remembers exactly what I remember.

Then the exchange begins.

A staircase I know appears in his memory.

A scar of his hurts me.

He remembers a shirt I used to wear.

I remember being afraid of a dog that belonged to his childhood.

I do not know where one of us ends.

Not because we are the same.

Precisely because we are not.

Two different things can touch without ceasing to be different.

That seems simple.

It is not.

The charmer smiles.

The snake raises its head.

And as it does, Farid moves too.

I respond.

We do not dance.

But something begins to repeat itself between our bodies.

One gesture produces another.

A tilt.

A glance.

Breathing.

As if someone were mixing two substances and waiting for a reaction.

Then I understand something I am probably inventing now:

you need to step outside yourself to be able to look at yourself.

The charmer too.

Perhaps that is why he has put us there.

To contemplate himself in what happens between two strangers.

Years later Farid calls Casey Walsh.

He wants him to write the history of Cygnus.

Not the version that appears in the annual reports.

The other one.

It does not take Casey long to understand that there is more than one.

He finds foundations that own companies that own paintings bought with money donated by people who officially never knew the buyers.

Provenances.

Auctions.

Appraisals.

Photographs.

A fake work can have an impeccable biography.

A genuine one can disappear because no one can prove where it came from.

Casey works comfortably among such things.

Not because he is corrupt.

The word is too easy.

He works comfortably because he distrusts the innocence of archives.

—Do you want me to write what happened? —he asks.

Farid thinks.

—I want you to write the history.

Casey smiles.

—It is not the same thing.

—That is why I called you.

Then he opens the documents.

He does not intend to discover an intact past.

He knows it does not exist.

Only remnants remain.

An invoice.

A painting.

A testimony that contradicts another.

A photograph cut off exactly where someone ought to appear.

The historian chooses.

The anthropologist too.

The painter.

The novelist.

Even a family.

You take what survived and decide what should remain beside what.

That is how continuity is manufactured.

Not necessarily a lie.

Something much more dangerous.

A form.

Farid does not sleep.

He has built enough form around the memory and can still see it.

The charmer.

The snake.

Me.

He gets up.

He drinks water.

He returns to bed.

Then he remembers a phrase he knows is false.

—Do not forget me.

My voice.

He is certain I never said it to him.

The memory insists.

There lies the problem.

A remembered lie does not become true.

But neither does it easily return to the place it came from.

Farid needs to forget.

Not erase.

Forgetting is something else.

Building over it.

A room.

Then another.

Then a corridor.

An entire building, until the first door continues to exist somewhere but no one remembers how to reach it.

Perhaps Cygnus serves that purpose.

Corporations.

Families.

Religions.

Books.

Every sufficiently large system ends up hiding some original room.

Now I bleed.

Something changes here.

I do not write that I was bleeding.

I bleed.

The difference frightens me more than the wound.

I have blood on my hand.

I watch it run down between my fingers.

Red.

Perfectly ordinary.

There is an image in front of me.

I do not want to raise my head because I know what is going to happen.

This is another of the things that repeat themselves.

I think I am going to look at her.

No.

The direction has already changed before I do.

She looks at me.

I do not need to say who.

Nor do I know whether it is a painting, an icon, or something that for a moment uses the form of both.

She looks at me.

That is enough.

I raise my eyes.

Time bends a little.

Farid is beside me again.

The snake raises its head.

The painter places the point at the center.

The priest holds God up to the light, and God undresses himself of nothingness again.

Casey writes a history that modifies what it intends to preserve.

Farid tries to forget a phrase I never said.

I bleed now.

Not before.

Now.

A drop falls.

Another.

On the floor they form an incomplete curve.

I crouch down.

For a few seconds I wait for the next one to close the circle.

It does not.

It falls in the center.

A point.

The navel again.

Perhaps that is why I keep writing it.

Not to know what it means.

To see whether next time it falls somewhere else.