Free Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco Page B

Jasper Gwyn noted something on his pieces of paper and pinned them to the floor, at points that he chose with minute attention.

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    Rebecca got in the habit of walking around those pieces of paper, on the days that followed, designing routes that took her from one to another, as if she were seeking the outline of some figure. She neverstopped to read them, she just walked around them. Slowly Jasper Gwyn saw her change, become different in her ways of revealing herself, more unexpected in her movements. Perhaps it was the seventh day, or the eighth, when he saw her suddenly composed into a surprising beauty, without flaw. It lasted a moment, as if she knew very well how far she had ventured, and had no intention of staying there. So she shifted her weight onto the other side, raising a hand to smooth her hair, and becoming imperfect again.
    That same day, she began to murmur, in a low voice, as she lay on the bed. Jasper Gwyn couldn’t hear the words, and didn’t want to. But she went on for many minutes, every so often smiling, or pausing in silence, and then starting up again. She seemed to be telling someone something. As she spoke she slid the palms of her hands back and forth along her extended legs. She stopped when she was silent. Without even realizing it, Jasper Gwyn approached the bed, like someone who is pursuing a small animal and ends up a few steps from its den. She didn’t react, she only lowered the tone of her voice, and continued to speak, but barely moving her lips, in a whisper that sometimes ceased, and then began again.
    The next day, while Jasper Gwyn was looking at her, her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment of transient thoughts or of memories in flight.
    If Jasper Gwyn had had to say when he began to think that there was a solution, probably he would have cited a day when, at a certain point, she put on her shirt, and it wasn’t a way of going back on some decision but of going forward beyond what she had decided. She kept it on but unbuttoned in the front—she played with the cuffs. Then something in her shifted, in a way that onemight have defined as lateral , and Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that Rebecca was letting him glimpse her true portrait.
    That night he went out and walked the streets, and he walked for hours, without feeling fatigue. He observed that there were Laundromats that never closed, and he registered the fact with a particular satisfaction.

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    He no longer saw her as fat, or beautiful, and whatever he had thought and learned about her, before entering that studio, had completely dissipated, or had never existed. As it seemed to him that time did not pass in there but that, rather, a single instant unrolled, always identical to itself. He began to recognize, sometimes, passages in David Barber’s loop, and their periodic returns, which were always the same, gave any lapse of time a poetic fixity compared to which what was happening in the world outside lost any enchantment. That everything took shape in a single unchanging, childish light was an infinite joy. The odors of the studio, the dust that was lying on things, the dirt that no one resisted—everything gave the impression of an animal in hibernation, breathing slowly, dead to the world. To the woman with the rain scarf, who wanted to know, Jasper Gwyn went so far as to explain that there was something hypnotic in all that, similar to the effects of a drug. I wouldn’t exaggerate, said the old woman. And she reminded him that it was, after all, only a job, the job of a copyist. Think rather of accomplishing something good, she added, otherwise you’ll be right back to meeting with students.
    â€œHow many days left?” asked Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œTwenty, I think.”
    â€œI have time.”
    â€œHave you already written something?”
    â€œNotes. Nothing it would make sense to read.”
    â€œIf I were you I wouldn’t be so calm.”
    â€œI’m