Moon Palace by Paul Auster Page B

tragedy to sink in. “He was only thirty-six at the time,” I said, “and to this day no one knows if it was an accident or not. Had one of his enemies murdered him, or was it simply a matter of chance, of blind fate pouring destruction down from the sky? Alas, poor Cyrano. This was no figment, my friends. He was a creature of flesh and blood, a real man who lived in the real world, and in 1649 he wrote a book about his trip to the moon. Since it’s a firsthand account, I don’t see why anyone should doubt what he says. According to Cyrano, the moon is a world like this one. When seen from that world, our earth looks just like the moon does from here. The Garden of Eden is located on the moon, andwhen Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, God banished them to the earth. Cyrano first attempts to travel to the moon by strapping bottles of lighter-than-air dew to his body, but after reaching the Middle Distance, he floats back to earth, landing among a tribe of naked Indians in New France. There he builds a machine that eventually takes him to his destination, which no doubt goes to show that America has always been the ideal place for moon launchings. The people he encounters on the moon are eighteen feet tall and walk on all fours. They speak two different languages, but neither language has any words in it. The first, used by the common people, is an intricate code of pantomime gestures that calls for constant movement from all parts of the body. The second language is spoken by the upper classes, and it consists of pure sound, a complex but unarticulated humming that closely resembles music. The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry—actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself. The worst crime is virginity, and young people are expected to show disrespect for their parents. The longer one’s nose, the more noble one’s character is considered to be. Men with short noses are castrated, for the moon people would rather die out as a race than be forced to live with such ugliness. There are talking books and traveling cities. When a great philosopher dies, his friends drink his blood and eat his flesh. Bronze penises hang from the waists of men—in the same way that seventeenth-century Frenchmen used to carry swords. As a moon man explains to the befuddled Cyrano: Is it not better to honor the tools of life than the tools of death? Cyrano spends a good part of the book in a cage. Because he is so small, the moon people think he must be a parrot without feathers. In the end, a giant black man throws him back to earth with the Anti-Christ.”
    I rattled on like that for several more minutes, but all the talk had worn me down, and I could feel my inspiration beginning to flag. Midway through my last speech (on Jules Verne and theBaltimore Gun Club), it abandoned me entirely. My head shrank, then grew enormously large; I saw peculiar lights and comets darting behind my eyes; my stomach began to rumble, to bulge with dagger-thrusts of pain, and suddenly I felt I was going to be sick. Without a word of warning, I broke off from my lecture, stood up from the table, and announced that I had to leave. “Thank you for your kindness,” I said, “but urgent business calls me away. You are dear, good people, and I promise to remember you all in my will.” It was a deranged performance, a madman’s jig. I staggered out of the kitchen, knocking over a coffee cup in the process, and groped my way to the door. By the time I got there, Kitty was standing next to me. To this day, I still don’t understand how she managed to get there before I did.
    “You’re a very strange brother,” she said. “You look like a man, but then you turn yourself into a wolf. After that, the wolf becomes a talking machine. It’s all mouths for you, isn’t it? First the food, then the words—into the mouth and out of it. But you’re