The Mirror Thief(54)

Welles is lengthening his stride, picking up the pace. When I was in Italy after the war, he says, I went to see Ezra Pound at the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa. He was imprisoned there, awaiting return to the United States to stand trial for treason. At the time there was every expectation he would be executed. Pound’s work was important to me at a critical time in my life. But I found his conduct during the war to be questionable. And I suppose I went to Pisa looking for some kind of explanation. Make a right turn here.

They turn onto Grand Boulevard. The street broadens, and the sky, heavy with fog, pushes between the palmtrees.

I was never able to speak with him, Welles says. No one was allowed to do that, not even the MPs. I was only able to see him very briefly. He was kept in a cell, eight feet by six, with a wooden frame and a tarpaper roof. He wore Army fatigues. He had neither belt nor shoelaces. There were more than three thousand other men in this facility, most of them hardened criminals—thieves, murderers, rapists—and almost all of them lived in the open, in tents. There were only ten cells like Pound’s. His, uniquely, was reinforced with galvanized mesh and airstrip steel. Because of the mesh walls, he was always exposed. To the sun, to the weather, to the eyes of the curious. It was always possible to see him. But no one could speak to him. In the Army’s formulation, you see, language was the weapon he had used to commit his crimes. Therefore the only language permitted him in his confinement came from his own mind, from his memory. I knew when I saw him that he had been utterly vanquished. I left Pisa very disappointed and dissatisfied. But some years later—after he had been declared insane and transferred to St. Elizabeth’s—I realized that that had been the ultimate acknowledgment of his power. For the Army to do that to him. I suppose in a sense I was fortunate to have been thwarted in speaking with him. More fortunate than you, I fear. We’ll make a left here on Riviera.

They’re nearing the oilfield now. Stanley can hear the sighs and hisses of machinery, and his sinuses churn with petroleum odors: sweet butane, bitter asphalt, fecal sulfur. In the median of a boulevard, a horsehead pump nods, throwing weird shadows under the derricks. The lights behind it wink as it rises and falls.

I was about to say, Welles says, that Pound’s silence was more powerful than any words could have been. But that is not correct. His silence was worthless. Powerless. As silence always is. Rather, it was the image of his silence. The sight of him in that cage. That has stayed with me. Reshaped, no doubt, according to the dictates of my personal mythology. Because that’s the trick, isn’t it? Our memories of language are generally stable. But how often do we remember words? It’s more often images that we recall. And images are slippery, which is why so many technologies have emerged throughout history to fix them. It’s also why successful despots tend to banish poets, or to imprison them—even poets like Pound, who are great admirers of despots—and why they tend to recruit and employ painters, sculptors, filmmakers, architects. Stop for a moment, Stanley. Let’s look at the moon.

They’re standing on the median a few yards east of the fenced-in pumpjack. Stanley can hear the soft whir of its electric motor, the whine and howl of the working beam. A few automobiles are still on the road, mostly cop cruisers; their headlights stretch shadows from the patchy grass as they veer off and onto the boulevard. The little dog roots around with its blunt nose, turning up stripped bolts and bits of glass, but Welles is quiet, staring at the pale circle in the western sky. It dilates as it sinks toward the horizon, its perfect circle sharp-edged, even in the fog.

It’s in your book a lot, Stanley says.

I’m sorry?

The moon. It’s in your book a lot.

Yes, Welles says. Yes, I suppose it is.

Like that part when Crivano’s on the boat. When he’s escaping. He has that whole conversation with the moon.

That’s right. He does.

My light conceals nothing, Stanley recites. You are my rescue, my restoration. I seek you in constant carnival, masked Crivano, along the waterline.

You have a good memory.

Or when he has his dream. I labor with the blind surveyors of night, Selene, and with bricks hewn from sleep I raise your city.

Welles shifts the leash from hand to hand. That’s another one, he says. You are quite right.

There at the beginning, even. In the malediction. The treasure he bears in his butterfly sack is none other than—

The foremost reflector itself. Of course. The book is, after all, called The Mirror Thief. The mirror is not meant to be understood literally. Not exclusively so, at any rate. Crivano is an alchemist. His mode of thought is Neoplatonic, derived from the sacred texts attributed to your patron deity, the Thrice-Great Hermes. To Crivano, the world is itself a reflection, the material emanation of an idea in the mind of God. We cannot know the mind of God any more than we can look directly upon the sun. We look at the moon instead, made visible to us by the sunlight that it reflects. The moon represents the Opus Magnum, the alchemist’s indirect means of discovering God’s thoughts in order to become like God. All mirrors contain something of this lunar essence.

Yeah, Stanley says. I got all that. It’s in your book. I read it.

I—I don’t think I stated it quite so explicitly in the book.

It’s clear enough. You can put it all together. This equals this equals that. I’m ignorant, all right, Mister Welles. But I ain’t dumb.