May 23 2006
A Certain Lucas
Lucas, his communications
Since he not only writes but likes to go over to the other side and read what others write, Lucas is surprised sometimes at how difficult it turns out to be for him to understand some things. It isn’t that they’re questions that are particualrly abstruse (a horrible word, thinks Lucas, who tends to heft them in the palm of his hand and familiarize himself with them or reject them depending on the color, the smell, or the touch), but suddenly there’s something like a dirty pane of glass between him and what he’s reading, whence impatience, forced rereading, imminent explosion, and finally the great flight of the magazine or book against the nearest wall with a subsequent fall and a damp plop.
When his reading ends that way, Lucas asks himself what the devil can have happened in the apparenly obvious passage from communicator to communicatee. It’s hard for him to ask that, because in his case the question is never raised and as rarefied as the air of his reading might be, the more that some things can only come and go after a difficult course. Lucas never ceases to verify whether the coming is valid and whether the going takes place without major obstacles. Little he cares about the individual situation of the readers, because he believes in a mysteriously multiform measurement that in the majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and that’s why it isn’t necessary to give ground in either the coming or the going: between him and the others there will be a bridge as long as what is wirtten is born of a seed and not a graft. In his most delirious inventions there’s something that at the same time is so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy. It’s not a matter of writing for others but for oneself, but oneself must also be the otehrs; so elementary, my dear Watson, that it even makes a person mistrust, asking himself if there can’t be an unconsious demagogy in that collaboration between sender, message, and receiver. Lucas looks at the word receiver in the palm of his hand, softly strokes its fur, and returns it to its uncertain limbo; he doesnt give a hoot for the receiver since he has him there within range, writing what he reads and reading what he writes, what the great fuck.
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A Certain Lucas
By Julio Cortazar
Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
But, he must have been around eight or nine then.].
