by Jordi Puntí
A few meters farther on he saw Place Saint-Épvre and, wanting to rest for a while, went to sit in the same terrace bar as the previous day. Drinking his Perrier, he told himself to be more patient, a little cooler in exploring the mystery of the roaming couple, and as he was thinking this, they turned up in his field of vision yet again. He watched her stop by the equestrian stature of René II, Duke of Lorraine, staring at it with excessive interest while her husband took a couple of photos. This comedy went on for a while, enough time for Felipe to get out his cell phone and take a photo of them without their noticing.
* * *
At half past six that evening, as arranged with the organizers, a taxi came to get him at the hotel and take him to the dinner. As they drove through the streets and around the traffic circles of Nancy, heading for a less central neighborhood, Felipe Quero looked at the photo he’d taken that midday. The slightly skewed angle gave it a furtive feel, like a spy game, highlighting the couple’s weird behavior, although their faces remained half-hidden. He tried enlarging the image on the screen but didn’t find anything of note. The woman was looking sideways, and the man was semiconcealed by the arm holding the camera. With these two ill-defined physiognomies, he told himself, the couple had all they needed to become fiction. It was easy to take the next step and speculate that, at the dinner, there’d probably be a couple who fitted the same profile.
Thus it was that his mission began in practice the moment his hosts welcomed him and he thanked them for their invitation. All in all, they told him, there’d be ten people present that night. It turned out that his hosts were from Morocco: pleasant, attentive people whose warmth made him feel at home. He, Karim, was a chef at his own restaurant. That night he’d cooked a Moroccan meal. Chaymae, his partner, was a lecturer in philosophy at the college. Bright-eyed and with an engaging smile, she told Felipe that she’d read his last novel and liked it a lot, which puffed up his ego for the rest of the evening. They took him out into the garden where the appetizer was being served and introduced him to their friends, the other guests. There was a librarian, a Tunisian musician who played the oud—
a kind of lute played in the Arab world; a lawyer and
a sociologist, both very discreet and apparently good friends; and a couple whom Felipe Quero instantly imagined could represent his two strangers. They were middle-aged and slightly standoffish. She painted realist portraits but in dirty style—there was one of Chaymae hanging in the living room—and he was an art critic specializing in forgeries.
While chatting with this couple, trying to work out how well they fitted with the morning’s photographer and his model, he mentally counted the guests. Nine. Then someone rang the bell and Chaymae went to open the door. The tenth person was another writer, a Catalan called Jordi Puntí, and Felipe Quero stared at him in some consternation. He knew the man by name but hadn’t read his books, and in these early moments Puntí seemed to be a little too grateful to his hosts, almost smarmy. Felipe had been more restrained, even a little distant, and now the contrast made him feel bad. He heard Chaymae telling Puntí that she’d read his last novel in translation and the coincidence made him seethe with inner fury. Was it his imagination or was Chaymae sounding more enthusiastic this time? He started fretting all over again: maybe he was a sort of fairground dummy after all, a secondary character at the service of this other writer . . . He went over to Puntí, greeted him, and none too subtly asked how come he was there. Then everything became clear. Some months earlier, Puntí had met the art critic in Hamburg at some cultural gathering and they’d become friends. Now, since he was taking part in the Nancy literary festival that weekend, they’d invited him to the dinner.
“They told me that you’re the guest of honor and that all this is part of some literary project,” Puntí said. “Good for you! I couldn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“I find it very difficult to write commissioned pieces. I’d get flustered. I tend to be all over the place. Do you know what you’re going to write about?”
“I’ve got some ideas . . .” Felipe Quero prolonged the uncertainty by letting it trail off into ellipsis.
The conversation relaxed. In the first few minutes he’d understood that the other guests saw him as a home-delivery storyteller, someone who was going to brighten their evening. Since they were in France, he automatically saw himself as being in a kind of nineteenth-century literary salon, complete with frock coat and pipe, and proffering very emphatic or very sibylline opinions, but then he reminded himself that he’d come to this dinner mainly to listen. If something came out of this gathering, if he managed to hunt or fish some item, time would tell. On further consideration, even the photo-taking couple was becoming an anecdote, a background story that maybe—and this was yet to be decided—wouldn’t go much beyond that.
By the time they were seated at the table, this receptive position was more palpable. The food was delicious and the red wine relaxed the formality. Karim had made fish soup and then chicken tagine with prunes and dates. The flavors, both intense and refined, led them to talk about the Mediterranean connection, the hedonist lifestyle that the inhabitants of western Europe tasted only when they went south on vacation. The Tunisian musician talked about the melodies that traveled around the Mediterranean in folk music or traditional songs as a nexus of cultural unity, while Karim drove the point home by referring to Andalusi nubah. “It’s the music of patience,” he said, and Felipe looked up from his plate.
Karim and the musician began to explain that nubah originated in the Maghreb states of North Africa and were influenced by flamenco and the culture of Andalusia. According to the tradition, there were initially twenty-four original compositions, or nubat, one for each hour of the day and lasting exactly sixty minutes, so that the whole cycle lasts twenty-four hours. They are played with several percussion and string instruments like the oud and are accompanied by a chorus. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to hear a complete cycle, but they still do sessions of nine or ten hours, which audiences, swept up in the ebb and flow of the experience, follow without losing interest.
“It’s music that grows inside you as you listen,” the Tunisian musician said, “constantly progressing in keeping with the rules of quickening rhythm that change from region to region. Later on, I can play a sample for you . . .”
They all accepted the offer, and over mint tea and dessert—pistachio pastries and sweet eggplant—the conversation broke up into small groups. At his end of the table, Felipe Quero, tuning in to them all, heard the librarian make a comment about Hannah Arendt, the lawyer talking about the tomatoes sold in French markets, the art critic from Hamburg describing the feats of one of Germany’s main forgers, a man named Wolfgang Beltracchi, and the lawyer quizzing Puntí about the political situation in Catalonia, a conversation joined by the Tunisian musician, who added his bit by commenting that the national anthem of Spain was brazenly copied from a twelfth-century Andalusi nubah. There was prodigious abundance in these intense shifts of stories and conversations that captivated Felipe Quero in a way not unlike images of a shoal of salmon struggling to swim upstream, rising from the water in surprising leaps against the current. He wished he had eight ears.
After a while, Chaymae suggested that they should go and sit on the sofas. The musician took this as his cue and got ready to play and sing, occasionally accompanied by Chaymae’s voice. To begin with, he chose ancient Arab songs, compositions that swaddled them in repetition while transporting them back to other times. He set to music classical forms like zajals and kharjas and then gradually ventured into modern poets like Victor Hugo, Apollinaire, and García Lorca, and finally he played his own compositions. Felipe Quero watched how passionately the man lived his music, how his face became transfigured with it, and there were moments when he felt impatient. This guy was so keen to show them different kinds of music and to try out his new compositions, and it was all dragging on too long. Then, after they’d been listening for about an hou
r, he announced a song inspired by an Andalusi poet. He played the first chords, recited the first lines, and then, prodded by some kind of haste, stopped and abruptly announced, “Et cetera.”
It was an extraordinary moment, a startling departure from the script, and everyone started to laugh. Then there was a silence that, while not intending to be accusatory, was precisely that. The sociologist—who, up to that point, had been very quiet—filled it by praising the music. “I think it’s very inspiring,” he said. “There’s deep interplay in the combination of notes which makes it more contemplative. I don’t want to come on as a mystic, but there’s very powerful evocative strength here even when you’re not sure what you want to evoke.” The musician couldn’t resist accompanying his words with four or five bars. “Some of you already know that in my free time I do hypnotism, that I’m a therapeutic hypnotist. When I was listening to the music a moment ago, I had the feeling that all those melodies were dragging me into the world of the unconscious . . .”
These comments made a great impression on the other guests. Felipe Quero wasn’t sure if it was a teasing joke but then saw that everyone else was taking it very seriously. They started asking the sociologist about hypnosis and he responded with professional devotion. He made it clear that this wasn’t a business or a show seeking to ridicule people but an exercise in deferred psychological self-control that could be very useful. Then Karim asked the question they all had on the tips of their tongues: “And could you give us a demonstration tonight?”
“I don’t think it would work,” the sociologist replied. “There are too many people. It’s better when it’s done in private, just the two of us . . . But, anyhow, if you want, we can try. Only so you can get an idea of what’s involved, without being able to go into it too deeply.”
Karim volunteered. Chaymae turned off the lights and only a few candles on the coffee table were left burning. The light bounced off wineglasses, the atmosphere became more intimate, and Karim lay on the sofa. Beside him, the hypnotist took a pendulum from his pocket and, staring at it, intent but not tense, pronounced some relaxing words. Sitting around him but at a certain distance, the rest were breathing in synchrony . . .
But it didn’t work. After a minute Karim stood up and said they should leave it. He’d drunk too much and couldn’t concentrate. There was a murmur of disappointment and the hypnotist said not to worry. It wasn’t unusual.
Felipe Quero wondered for a few seconds whether he should volunteer for this hypnosis session. This might be the moment he was waiting for, the engine of a story which would surge from his subconscious, in front of everyone. Then, however, Jordi Puntí beat him to it and, taking advantage of the lull in the conversation, said that if the other guests didn’t mind, he’d like to try, too. From his corner, Felipe Quero mutely cursed him with all his might and glanced at the other guests almost as if trying to infect them with his annoyance. After all, wasn’t he the guest of honor? No one seemed to notice. The sociologist was happy to comply and asked Puntí to get comfortable on the sofa.
This time the hypnotist’s chant was clearer and Puntí let himself go. It was evident that he was a willing subject. His arms and legs looked lifeless and his belly rose and fell in time with the leisurely rhythm of his breathing. Concentrating on the pendulum, it seemed to him that he was going down a very long staircase, with narrow steps and no handrail, slowly taking him to swampy ground with low mists and squelchy mud. As his eyes closed, he gazed into the distance, a vanishing point that could be Timbuktu or Farawayland. It was a place that both tempted and frightened him, but, with its outlines now being defined, a voice coming from outside him was telling him that he couldn’t stop. When he got to the bottom, he didn’t know whether three minutes, three days, or three years had gone by.
Author’s Note
All the stories in this volume have already had a dress rehearsal in the form of publication in some other place: magazines, newspapers, or jointly authored volumes . . . All of them, too, were commissioned and briefly presented, after which they went off to sleep the sleep of the just. The oldest among them are seventeen years old and are contemporaries of the stories in the collection Animals tristos (Empúries, 2002). The more recent ones were written in 2016. Although the initial impulse was almost always external, I wrote them with the same literary rigor as I would any other story. If there was some prior stipulation—regarding characters, theme, and setting—I molded it to fit the style I wanted. That’s why now, some time later, they have probably earned the right to appear in this collection.
One of the more usual problems of commissioned works is length. It almost always affects me, more on the side of excess than brevity, and I frequently have to cut what I’ve written in order to deliver the final text. Now, totally free and with a touch of revenge, I’ve recovered some of those excluded fragments. I’ve also taken the opportunity to rewrite some of the stories, especially the older ones, in the hope of making them more amenable to today’s readers. In the process, I’ve discovered that, however much you rewrite a text or want to rid it of temporal ingenuousness, there are things that never disappear: the hallmark of the moment when you wrote it, the person you were, the literary concerns that moved you, and even the world around you. For example, one of the stories, “Consolation Prize,” is now subtitled “An Analogical Tale” because nowadays, in the era of cell phones, the Internet, and social networks, Ibon’s adventures would have taken another route. In fact, the whole thing would be so predictable, it wouldn’t even be worth writing about.
Reading and revising these stories, I picked up a coincidence I hadn’t foreseen: music plays a prominent role and is not always merely decorative or atmospheric. I guess that’s inevitable. I mean that the general bent of the book reveals my musical curiosity. Hence, while I was working on this collection, it seemed to me that the title had to reflect this constant presence, which is why I decided on This Is Not America. Written and recorded by David Bowie and Pat Metheny, “This Is Not America” is a song I like because of the calm it conveys, and also because they expressly composed it as a soundtrack for the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. Moreover, as a natural consequence of this musical affiliation, I find echoing in the spirit of some of the stories lines of a poem written by Enric Casasses and set to music by Pascal Comelade. Titled “Amèrica,” it begins with the words which I have made mine: “Amèrica és el poble del costat” (“America’s the next village”).
In recognition of the first life of these nine stories, I shall now offer in chronological order some details about their original appearance.
An early version of “Consolation Prize: An Analogical Tale” appeared with the title “Com si demanés un desig” (“As if He Made a Wish”) in the collection of love stories Tocats d’amor (Columna, 2000) by the Germans Miranda collective.
A first version of “My Best Friend’s Mother” (“La mare del meu millor amic”) appeared in La vida sexual dels germans M. by the Germans Miranda collective (Columna, 2002), an anthology of erotic stories.
“Seven Days on the Love Boat” (“Set dies al Vaixell de l’Amor”) was commissioned by the Saló Nàutic (International Boat Show) of Barcelona and was published in a Catalan-Spanish bilingual edition with drawings by Mariscal (Mòbil Books, 2006).
“Matter” (“La matèria”) was first published only in Spanish translation with the title “Veo veo Mr. Materia” (“I See, I See, Mr. Matter”) in a special issue devoted to television of the magazine Eñe (La Fábrica, 2007).
“Kidney” (“Ronyó”) was commissioned for publication in the book El llibre de la Marató de TV3 (Edicions 62, 2011), which was a fund-raiser for the television marathon devoted to organ and tissue regeneration and transplants.
“The Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes” (“El miracle dels pans i els peixos”) was serialized in shorter format as a summer vacation story, from August 15 to 19, 2016, in the newspaper El Periódico, where it was titled “Destí Las Vegas” (“Destination Las Vegas
”).
“Vertical” is included in the jointly authored anthology Gira Barcelona (Comanegra, 2016). This time the conditions of the commission were precisely defined: the story had to be set in Barcelona, between ten and twelve at night, in the month of June, and it had to be written in the third person and the present tense.
“Blinker” (“Intermitent”) appears in an anthology titled Risc (:Rata_, 2017), by several authors and, more than a commission, it was an invitation, since there were no prior stipulations apart from intrinsic literary risk.
“Patience” (“La paciència”) arose from an invitation by the Goethe Institute of Germany to take part in the Hausbesuch (Home Visit) project together with eight other writers from around Europe. After spending some days in Hamburg and Nancy, and having dinner in four homes, two in each city to which I’d been invited, I was to write a short story based on the conversations, walks, and experiences of those days. The results of the project were published in ebook form (Frohmann Verlag, 2017) in seven languages: Catalan, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese.
More from the Author
Lost Luggage
About the Author
JORDI PUNTÍ was born in 1967 and lives in Barcelona. He is mainly a fiction writer, and a regular contributor to the Spanish and Catalan press. He has published three books of short stories, and the novel Lost Luggage, which won numerous prizes, including the Premi Llibreter, the Catalan booksellers prize, and has been translated into more than sixteen languages. He’s also the author of Els castellans (The Castilians), a memoir on the relationship in the 1970s between Catalan kids and the immigrants who arrived from Spain to an industrial town. In 2014 he was a recipient of the fellowship for the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library, for a fiction project. His most recent book, translated into English, is Messi. Lessons in Style (2018), a literary essay collection that explores the genius of one of the best soccer players in the world.
