touched the floor, the pavilion trembled slightly. How long did the gesture last? It was fleeting and infinite, concentrated and widespread, unique and multiple, but Sandro had been nurturing it for sixty years, and the line was traced with a flowing ease that made the members of the last alliance rub their eyes, because on the wood of the pavilion there was only one line.
a single naked line
that contained all the others
a single black line where
all the colors and all the shapes
could be seen
a single line starting on the floor of the pavilion
and extending to the surface of the Flemish painting
absorbing its figures and its stories
Petrus had already seen a similar line in Katsura, drawn by the Head of the Council who, it was said, had witnessed the birth of the bridge. His curving calligraphy looked like a single line which, in turn, represented every possible curve, just as today they could see only a single brushstroke and yet they perceived everything that was visible. What illusion of vision enabled it to bring with it the consistency and prolixity of the world? While this world was regaining its colors and Maria was focusing her mind on Sandro’s line, Petrus thought again: it is the visionary who gives his flesh to the story, but he must have the power of these little girls to write the text.
On the floor, the ink dried, and gradually the line grew larger until it passed through the wooden partitions of the pavilion, which had become transparent. Outside, the line changed into a colossal structure that expanded to create a bridge sparkling with darkness, with neither arch nor pillars, a simple black streak leading far away to the outer reaches of one’s gaze.
“The new bridge,” said Maria.
The mist that had once engulfed the arch coiled in on itself in one last graceful sigh of languor, then pulled apart, before melting slowly into the arch. Mist from all the provinces appeared on the horizon and, unrolling over the valley, they too headed toward the new bridge between the two worlds.
When there was no more mist they looked at the bridge and saw that it ended in the void. Its pure line flowed into nothing, where one could discern neither mist, nor trees, nor clouds. Below it, a dark lake had appeared.
“I have lived for no other reason than to see this vision,” said Sandro.
In the room, the ancestor in his multiple incarnations began to spin and, with each spin a species was absorbed into him, while it went through the partitions of the pavilion and melted into the lacquer of the bridge. And so, Clara played a hymn—a strange hymn, as free as the clouds, as dangerous as fervor—and on the painting, which had become a simple spot of black ink, there were inscriptions in the language of elves that humans could now understand—the drifting story they’d foreseen in the beginning, the one that simply wanted to be written and was waiting for someone who was willing to continue the work of the painter from Amsterdam—the story that told of the tears of love and the landscapes of fervor.
In the final hour of loving
Everything shall be empty and full of wonder
How does one capture the passing sparkle? All that is required—something elves know how to do—is to reduce life to its most basic framework and inscribe it on a final landscape in its essential nudity; then in the end, turn the landscape—something humans know how to do—into the setting of the last story—the novel of novels, the fiction of fictions.
In the final hour of loving
Everything shall be empty and full of wonder
The inscriptions, on leaving the surface of the painting, passed through the partitions of the pavilion and melted into the bridge of ink. The mist had lived and now was making room for the void where creatures and things move about. Just like the miraculous mist that rendered the world never completely visible—sometimes opting to cover all the universe except for a single bare branch, then contracting to allow the greatest possible proportion of things to be seen—the void restored the balance of invisible wholeness.
You must understand what it is, this void we are talking about, because we people in the West are accustomed to thinking it is simply nothingness, absence, or lack of matter and life, whereas the void that the new novel of the world wished for was an authentic substance. It was the valley in which things bathe, the inhabited breath of life