The Seamstress and the Wind

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THESE LAST WEEKS, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.” The heroine has to be a seamstress, at a time when there were seamstresses. . and the wind her antagonist, she sedentary, he a traveler, or the other way around: the art a traveler, the turbulence fixed. She the adventure, he the thread of the adventures. . It could be anything, and in fact it must be anything, any whim, or all of them, if they begin transforming into one another. . For once I want to allow myself every liberty, even the most improbable. . Although the most improbable, I should admit, is that this plan will work. The gusts of the imagination do not carry one away except when one has not asked for it, or better: when one has asked for the opposite. And then there is the question of finding a good plot.

Anyway, last night, this morning, at dawn, still half asleep, or more asleep than I thought I was, a subject occurred to me — rich, complex, unexpected. Not all of it, just the beginning, but that was just what I needed, what I had been waiting for. The character was a man, which wasn’t a problem because I could make him the seamstress’s husband. . However, when I woke up I had forgotten it. I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it. In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something. . Still, the sensation is not complete; a vague little trace remains, in which I hope there is a loose end that I could pull and pull. . although then, to go on with the metaphor, pulling on that strand would erase the embroidered figure and I would be left with a meaningless white thread between my fingers. It’s about. . let me see if I can put it in a few sentences: A man has a very precise and detailed premonition of three or four events that will happen in the immediate future all linked together. Not events which will happen to him, but to three or four neighbors, out in the country. He enters a state of accelerated movement to make use of his information: speed is necessary because the efficacy of the trick is in arriving on time, at the point at which the events coincide. . He runs from one house to another like a billiard ball bouncing on the pampas. . I get this far. I see nothing more. Actually, the thing I see least is the novelistic merit of this subject. I’m sure in the dream all that senseless agitation came wrapped in a precise and admirable mechanism, but now I don’t know what that was. The key to the code has been erased. Or is that what I should provide myself, with my deliberate work? If so, the dream doesn’t have the least use, and it leaves me as unequipped as before, or more so. But I resist giving it up, and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself. Taking control of forgetting is little more than a gesture, but it would be a gesture consistent with my theory of literature, at least with my disdain for memory as a writer’s instrument. Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful. . and at the root of the dream idea there must have been something of that, because those serial prophecies, so suspicious, lacking in content as they are, all seem to come to an end at a vertex of dissolution, of forgetting, of pure reality. A multiple, impersonal forgetting. I should note, in parentheses, that the kind of forgetting that erases dreams is very special, and very fitting for my purposes, because it’s based on doubt as to whether the thing we should be remembering actually exists; I suppose that in the majority of cases, if not in all of them, we only believe we’ve forgotten things when actually they had never happened. We haven’t forgotten anything. Forgetting is simply a sensation.