Crepereia Tryphaena: From The Three Caskets

"We are not concerned," he said, "with long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters—without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life."

—Bruno Schulz, Treatise on Tailors' Dummies

It is thanks to a woman's name, as mysterious as the obliterated letters of an ancient alphabet, as difficult to retain as a language learned and never spoken, that there came back to me not the memory of a dream, but the memory of having dreamed. Just as a rhyme in prose summons other words, composing a story that may begin at the end, the name Crepereia Tryphaena (which I first heard spoken by a foreign friend, during a conversation in which we moved several times from one language to the other) now conjures up an unfastened necklace, faded gold, and the mute articulation of bone and ivory. And instead of the absent train of a heroine, the humiliation of a child before a couple of newlyweds. But how to reach that point without going back as far as the Flood, or at least without pausing on the banks of the Tiber, which felt the earthly tread of Crepereia for so short a time?

Having come from Orvieto where the veined marble, the green color of the lizards, mourning, and Summer combine to give the impression that forgetting a word, a fragment of poetry, or a name is a piece of luck that opens onto an abyss, I had taken the Via Flaminia in order to arrive in Rome by the Porta del Popolo. Passing through Viterbo (the "stream of its daughters" running through the middle of the dead city, as far as the embalmer's shop where it is forbidden to blaspheme), I had crossed Etruria and the regions that last century were still marshland ("the mephitic halo" as certain travelers called it), accompanied in spirit by Champollion, whose biography I had read in the last days of July: not only had he taken the same route to come and decipher the hieroglyphs on the obelisks of Rome, but he had a lover's intuition about this territory which the trip to Egypt and death did not leave him time to verify, though he did take the trouble to write it down. I had on me a genuine passport, the fragment of a letter in which he requests its recipient to pass on a message to a certain Orioli: "Tell him to marry Egypt and Etruria; they are well suited to each other. I have always suspected that there was once some intimacy between them, and I believe that the complete record of their secret correspondence will soon reach us. A billet doux in hieroglyphs replying to a billet doux in Etruscan must have been a touching thing. But it did happen, I have no doubt of that: scarabs are proof of fond memories and of a very old mutual attachment between these two ancient lands."

I did not know, as I copied out these lines in which the scholar recalls the lover, and perhaps, even more so, a child who learned to read in secret, how closely they would become linked for me to the secrets of genealogy and to the way in which memory seeks in vain to restore its prestige.

I first heard that name in which thunder crackles today, as something that encapsulated the mute but raging silence of the world.

And at the outbreak of one of those storms that turn Rome into a foundering ark, or more simply a leaking ship (I was finishing dinner on the terrace outside the Archimedes opposite Minerva's elephant which looks as though it has crossed the Alps with Hannibal's armies, and which for three centuries has, with precarious equilibrium, carried on its back an obelisk poised to crash to the ground), I had time neither to retain, nor to ask my interlocutor to repeat, the name uttered...