This is the story of how Maurice Blanchot slips under a bridge one day.
* * *
Maurice Blanchot woke up one morning with Arvo Pärt playing in his ears, without being able to explain why. He looked up at the ceiling and heard the piano notes in his head, loud and clear. At the same time, he saw a bridge in Prague, and he saw the wide gray river that flowed under the bridge, and the blackbirds that flocked and circled dramatically above. And in the middle of the bridge: nothing. Everywhere on the bridge: nothing. He couldn’t remember having ever seen the bridge, nor having dreamed about it. It was suddenly just there in his mind’s eye, when he woke up, with the music he could not remember having heard, or dreamed. His head was full of something completely new.
* * *
Maurice Blanchot got out of bed and went into the living room. His living room was empty. The wooden floor was cold under his bare feet and he thought to himself that it was definitely autumn. The room was cold and he looked out onto the street; the tree that reached up to his window had turned yellow without him noticing. He opened the window, stretched out, grabbed hold of a branch and shook it as hard as he could.
* * *
Voilà.
* * *
Yellow leaves rained down from the tree, spinning to the ground. He looked down. There were plenty there from before. It’s definitely autumn! Blanchot said and shivered, as he was standing there in only his underpants. It smelled of damp soil. Rain. He closed the window. Went out into the hall to get his bag and pulled out the Arvo Pärt CD. The strange thing was that Blanchot had bought the CD the day before on his way home from a lonely evening in a lonely bar. He knew nothing about Arvo Pärt, he had just decided on impulse to go into the music shop that was open late, and suddenly found himself staring at the light green CD cover with a name on it that appealed to him, without him being able to explain why, ARVO PÄRT—it often happened to Maurice Blanchot that a name appealed to him. He thought about names as great, heavy freighters that glided past in the dark on the world’s vast oceans, never meeting, other than in collision or by blowing their horns from a distance. Buying the CD was like sounding his horn, a long call from a lonely ship; he had bought it, put it in his bag. Forgotten it. Gone to bed without thinking that he’d bought a new CD. Fallen asleep. Woken with the music playing in his ears. That is to say, how could he know that it was that music he woke up to, playing in his ears? He just knew that it was. He put the CD into the CD player. Pressed play.
Voilà.
The music.
Precisely the music he had woken up to playing in his ears. “How can you explain that?” Blanchot asked no one. But the room was somehow full of something completely new. Blanchot lay down on the bright blue Persian carpet and listened. “It’s like being underwater,” he said. He closed his eyes, let his hands run gently along the soft fibers of the carpet. The picture of the bridge in Prague popped into his mind again. But this time he was floating in the gray flowing water, approaching the bridge feetfirst, he could see the toes of his shoes sticking up in front of him like the prow of a gondola, and the bridge was getting closer, like a mouth, closer and closer, the whole horizon was getting strangely close, a jagged city skyline, church spires, overhead tram lines, and the bridge. The bridge reared up dramatically above him and he slipped under, it got darker, he could only just make out the pattern of the cement that joined the stone blocks and then he slipped out on the other side, and he saw that in the time that he was under the bridge, dusk had fallen and a flock of blackbirds swooped over him. And then he spotted the soles of another pair of shoes. Coming in the opposite direction, upstream, toward the bridge. Blanchot lifted his head a little so that he could see better, and now he could see that the soles belonged to a long pair of legs, a body, and a head. It was I, Julio Cortàzar, who was floating toward him with the same surprised look on my face. As we slipped by one another, Maurice Blanchot said: “You’re going against the current!” And I had time to say “No” before we passed one another, Maurice Blanchot going downstream, and I upstream and under the bridge.