VARIATIONS ON THE BODY/POTENTIAL How many tents, in addition, are fitted in me, tents whose skin walls shelter, as well, the planning adolescent and the throng of adults, regretful of the immense joys so late in coming? For the number of years reckons, also, one by one, those persons, multiple, who take up residence under senility's wornout appearance. Don't think they necessarily get on well with one another, under the pretext that they stated, successively, the same first and last name as mine, for they don't always speak the same language: the youngest chatters Gascon and the oldest stammers out English, one, among the earliest inhabitants, only thinks about fishing and breaking the rocks of the Garonne and another only about holding the ship's course to leeward of Guernsey, the atheist turns his back on the one who prays, the athlete is amazed at the monk, the silent solitary mocks the lecturer, the contemplative allows the entrepreneur to go about his business and the mystic, strangely, gets along, a twin, with the one in love. Whom are you addressing?
Illustration 42. Around the wrinkles of the eyes and the corners of the smile can be read, as though written on the body, the circumstances of a life so well filled that the face includes everything. Goodness designates this vast space. A Dutch master (Jan van Eyck?), middle of the XVth century, Portrait of the Ferrara Court Jester Gonella. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The one called I and me and you and he, depending, acts as the switchboard operator who connects, quickly, Paris with Chile, to let the American converse with the Japanese. The stilted clumsiness of old age stems from the fact that it, often, becomes confused among the thousands of plugs and connections, 57