226
PARTISAN REVIEW
again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answer–
ing.
Every morning before my classes begin I do an hour of jogging,
that is I put on my Olympic sweatsuit and I go out to run because I feel
the need to move, because the doctors have ordered it
to
combat the
excess weight that oppresses me, and also to relieve my nerves a little.
In this place during the day if you do not go to the campus, to the
library, or to audit colleagues' courses, or to the University coffee shop,
you do not know where to go; therefore the only thing is to start
running this way or that on the hill, among the maples and the
willows, as many students do and also many colleagues. We cross on
the rustling paths of leaves and sometimes we say "Hi!" to each other.
Sometimes nothing, because we have to save our breath. This too is an
advantage running has over other sports: everybody is on his own and
is not required to answer to the others.
The hill is entirely built up and as I run I pass two-storey wooden
houses with yards, all different and all similar, and every so often I hear
a telephone ring. This makes me nervous; instinctively I slow down; I
prick up my ears to hear if somebody answers and I become impatient
when the ringing continues. Continuing my run I pass another house
in which a telephone is ringing, and I think: "There is a telephone
chasing me, there is somebody looking up all the numbers on Chestnut
Lane in the directory and he is calling one house after the other to see if
he can overtake me."
Sometimes the houses are all silent and deserted, squirrels run up
the tree trunks, magpies swoop down to peck at the feed set out for
them in wooden bowls. Running, I feel a vague sensation of alarm, and
even before I can pick up the sound with my ear, my mind records the
possibility of the ring, almost summons it up, sucks it from its own
absence, and at that moment from a house comes, first muffled then
gradually more distinct, the trill of the bell, whose vibrations perhaps
for some time had already been caught by an antenna inside me before
my hearing perceived them, and there I go rushing in an absurd frenzy,
I am the prisoner of a circle in whose center there is the telephone
ringing inside that house, I run without moving away, I hover without
shortening my stride.
"If
nobody has answered by now it means nobody is home.. . . But
why do they keep on calling then? What are they hoping? Does a deaf
man perhaps live there, and do they hope that by insisting they will
make themselves heard? Perhaps a paralytic lives there, and you have to
allow a great deal of time so that he can crawI
to
the phone....
