From your eyes to the table it is five paces; from the table to the far wall, six paces; from the wall to the door, eight paces. On the table the large reddish mass of meat, still intact, cannot be seen. On the table in the picture the meat is still visible, but beside the table now you see two men in baggy brown trousers. In the corner opposite the cat in the picture the child can no longer be seen. In the reflection of the pupil of the cat in the picture you no longer see the cat in the corner, five paces from the table. This is
not reality.
You would seek desperately an eraser to rub out this memory. Your tail drags in a slovenly way against the ninety-degree angle formed by the two walls that meet behind your back. You ask yourself if it is your feline condition that leads you to see the world in this objective way, or if the maze in which you find yourself is your habitual space and also the
Esquisse d’un nouveau chat maze of the man beside the table. Or if you both are only the image in the eye above you, which subjects you both to this tension as a purely literary exercise. If that is the case, it is not fair.
There should be a relationship that will allow you to unify the things that you have witnessed, the things that have witnessed you, and the things you have been. The things in which you have seen yourself motionless mut have some ambiguous connection with both the things that have been seen and with you who have seen.
If the man made a leap toward the picture and gripped the child with his teeth, you then pursued him into the picture, beyond the door of the tavern and into the road over which whitish flakes of snow flutter, first slanting then increasingly straight and closer to your eyes, Jike filiform, darting shadows, vague dots that vibrate before you.
They are your whiskers. If the man took the meat, if you made your leap, if the meat was on the table, and the child fled among the flakes of snow, who has taken the meat that you will devour and that now remains on the table where you did not see it?
But you are a cat, probably, and you remain an object in this situation. You cannot alter it. You want the situation altered, but that would mean an alteration of yourself. This i-s your universe. What you are contemplating is a human universe of which you know nothing, just as They know nothing of yours. Still, the idea tempts you.
You contemplate a possible new novel, with yours as the ordering mind, but you do not dare carry this further, because you would inevitably introduce the horrible disorder of the evident into the tranquil improbability of your maze.
You consider the story of a cat, a respectable cat of noble birth, whom no one would expect so many and such dreadful adventures to befall, though in fact they do. This cat suffers various vicissitudes and surprises, unexpected agnitions (he has lain with his own mother, or killed his own father to gain possession of the large red chunk of meat), and as these trials multiply, the audience of cats witnessing the play feels pity and terror; until the logicar development of events culminates in a sudden catastrophe, a final denouement of all tensions, after which the cats present, and you who have ordered their emotions, enjoy a purification, a catharsis.
Now you know that such a resolution would make you master of the room, and of the meat, and perhaps of the man and the child. No denials: you are morbidly drawn by this path for a future cat. But then you would be tagged a member of the avant-garde. You know you will never write this story. You have never even considered it, never told anyone you might have considered it while watching a piece of meat. You have never crouched in the corner of this room.
Now a cat is in the corner of the room where the walls meet to form a ninety-degree angle. From the tip of his whiskers to the table it is five paces.
1961
The Latest from Heaven
The passages that follow are taken from the notebook of the reporter John Smith, whose lifeless body was found on the slopes of Mount Ararat. The newspaper that employed Smith confirms that he was sent to Asia Minor on a special assignment, but refuses to disclose the nature of that assignment. Since Ararat is on the Armenian frontier, the media blackout was probably imposed by the State Department, anxious to avoid an international incident.
Smith’s body showed no wound beyond some severe burns, «like he’d been struck by lightning,» to quote the shepherd · who found him. But the Erzurum Meteorological Bureau informs us that for the past six months the area has had no storms of any kind, not even heavy rains. This text evidently represents a series of statements made to Smith by an unidentified source not named elsewhere in the notebook.
Rain! It’s this damn government! You see? That cloud over there. It never stops dripping. But just try complaining. There must be more than a hundred of them around here. They spend a fortune to set up those big picturesque cirrus.
Public relations, they say. While everything’s going to pot around here, falling apart. Look, I’m telling you these things, but don’t put down my name: I’m not asking for trouble. Besides, I’m the lowest rung on this ladder. I’ve been here two thousand years, but I arrived with that whole batch of Christian Martyrs, and they treat us like dogs. It’s no merit of yours, they say, you have the lions to thank. You know what I mean? Except for the Holy Innocents, we’re really the bottom of the heap., But what I’m saying now you can hear from ten thousand times ten thousand others, even higher up, because discontent has spread everywhere.
So write it down, write it down.
Falling apart, I say. This huge bureaucracy, but nothing solid, concrete. That’s the story.
And He doesn’t know. Not one thing. It’s all run by the Higher Echelons; their word is law, and they never let us in on anything. The machine just keeps cranking along.
You want to know something? Even today anyone who’s killed ten Moslems can get in automatically: it’s a rule that dates back to the First Crusade and nobody’s ever bothered to repeal it. So every day twenty, thirty parachute troops come marching in, and nobody lifts a finger. I’m telling you. And there’s still a Bureau for the Elimination of the Albigenses. There’s no knowing what goes on there, but it exists, with its own letterhead and all the special benefits.
Try doing something about it. The Dominations-they’re a terrible clique-won’t let anybody get a foot in the door.
Big or little, all requests get the same treatment. Consider the fuss raised over the rehabilitation of Satan. Easy enough, wouldn’t you think? You open a communicating passage below, and the whole problem of evil is settled. Actually, this is what the young Thrones are after, but you see how they’ve been shut up. And the Guardians?
Have you read about that? They were far down, very close to humans; they understood them, and naturally took their part. Well, some Guardians may have gone too far in fraternizing; class solidarity, it’s only natural. So? Off they went, reassigned to the Boiler Room of the Primum Mobile. And nobody knows-I repeat, nobody!-if He was told anything. They do as they like, issuing their decrees and their letters, and noth
ing budges. Not an inch.
Look how many centuries it took them to accept the Ptolemaic reform. When Ptolemy died, they still hadn’t ratified the Pythagorean reform, holding on to that barbaric model with the Earth flat as a dish and the edge of the abyss right beyond the Pillars of Hercules. And you know something else? When
Dante arrived here, they were barely finishing with Ptolemy, there was still a Music of the Spheres Department-they hadn’t realized that if each planet in its revolutions made a different sound of the scale, then all together they’d be like a kitten on the keyboard, one hell of a racket. Pardon the expression. I meant to say: infernal din.
And another thing. Just listen to this: When Galileo published the Saggiatore, here they were still circulating a pamphlet denouncing the Counterearth of Pythagoras. But He never heard the story of the Counterearth-I know this from a thoroughly reliable source. Throughout the entire Middle Ages He
was kept in ignorance; the Seraphim gang worked hand-in-glove with the Theology Faculty in Paris, and they took charge of the whole question.
In the old Eden days He was a different being. He was something to be seen, they say! He rose in person, descended upon Adam and Eve, and you should have heard Him! And earlier still? Totally self-made, He is, with His own hands. That talk about resting on the seventh day? Ha! That’s when He did His filing.
But even then, yes, even then . . . T o put His hands on Chaos, what He had to go through! There was Raphael and another ten or twelve bigwigs who were opposed; they had inherited Chaos, which was then divided into estates. It was their reward for driving out the Rebels . . . So He had to use
