Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page A

He could hardly be sitting at a table, infront of a computer. He finally realized that anything would be ridiculous except to start work and discover on the spot, at the right moment, what it made sense to do and what it didn’t. So no desk, no laptop, not even a pencil the first day, he decided. He allowed himself only a modest shoe rack, to place in a corner: he imagined that he would like, each time, to be able to put on the shoes that that day seemed to him most fitting.
    Occupied by all these things, he had immediately felt better, and for a while he no longer had to keep at bay the crises that had afflicted him for months. When he felt the sensation of disappearing, whose arrival he had come to recognize, he refused to get frightened and concentrated on his thousands of tasks, carrying them out with an even more maniacal scrupulousness. In attention to the details he found instant relief. This led him, at times, to reach almost literary peaks of perfectionism. He happened, for example, to find himself in the presence of an artisan who made light bulbs. Not lamps: bulbs. He made them by hand. He was an old man with a gloomy workshop in the neighborhood of Camden Town. Jasper Gwyn had looked for him for a long time without even knowing whether he existed, and had finally found him. What he intended to ask him for was not only a very particular light— childish , he would explain—but, in particular, a light that would last for a certain predetermined time. He wanted bulbs that would go out after thirty-two days.
    â€œAll at once or suffering death throes?” asked the old man, as if he were thoroughly acquainted with the problem.

21
    The matter of the light bulbs may seem of dubious relevance, but for Jasper Gwyn it had, instead, become a crucial issue. It had to do with time. Although he still hadn’t the least idea of what the act of writing a portrait could be, he had come up with a certain idea of its possible duration—as it is possible to decipher the distance and not the identity of a man walking at night. He had immediately dismissed something rapid, but it was also hard to imagine an action whose ending was random and possibly very far off. So he had begun to measure—lying on the floor, in the studio, in absolute solitude—the weight of the hours and the texture of the days. He had in mind a journey, similar to what he had seen in the paintings that day, and he intended to work out the pace at which it could be made, and the length of the road that would bring it to a destination. He had to identify the speed at which embarrassments would dissolve and the slowness with which some truth would rise to the surface. He realized that, as in life, only a certain punctuality could make that act complete—as it makes some moments of the living happy.
    In the end he had decided that thirty-two days might represent a first, credible approximation. He determined that he would try one work session a day, for thirty-two days, four hours a day. And here was the importance of the light bulbs.
    The fact is that he couldn’t imagine something that stopped abruptly, at the end of the last sitting, in a bureaucratic and impersonal way. It was obvious that the end of the work would have to be an elegant process, perhaps poetic, and possibly unpredictable. Then he found the solution he had been working on for thelight—eighteen bulbs hanging from the ceiling, at regular intervals, in a perfect geometry—and he imagined that around the thirty-second day those bulbs would begin to go out one by one, randomly, but all in an interval of time that was no less than two days and no more than a week. He saw the studio glide into darkness, in patches, following an arbitrary pattern, and he fantasized about how they would move around, he and the model, in order to make use of the last lights, or, on the contrary, to take refuge in the first dark places. He saw himself distinctly in the weak