Come On Up
Page 1
MORE PRAISE FOR
Come On Up
“Come On Up is a solid collection of short fiction centered amidst our modern moment of frustrated ambitions, declining opportunity, and the twenty-first century paradox of unlimited choices and meaningless decisions. Nopca’s tales, situated in his hometown Barcelona, focus mostly on couples and interpersonal relationships, many with a deliciously absurdist bent. A caustic, sly humor and sardonic social malaise pervade Come On Up, but never in a disaffected, indifferent way—on the contrary, there’s a liveliness to all the listlessness. … Nopca’s storytelling and sharp wit are each remarkably entertaining. Come On Up employs a verve that is simultaneously of the times and contrary to its darker, deleterious impulses.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
“The day will come when there’ll be no need to keep repeating how Nopca’s talent and his corrosive humor have exploded and electrified the literature of Spain: it will be common knowledge.”
—Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co. and Mac’s Problem
“Wry yet tender, Jordi Nopca’s stories are a chronicle of the sentimental and existential doubts of Barcelona’s struggling younger generation—just trust me: read them.”
—Jordi Puntí, author of Lost Luggage and This Is Not America
“Delightfully witty, insightful, and masterfully told.”
—Booklist
“All of the stories make noise, and some of them really take off.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Read these stories for Nopca’s talent at consistently surprising with plots that march relentlessly in unforeseeable directions, and for his astuteness at charging situations with comic tension and leading readers into potent, perplexing spaces that explode unexpectedly.”
—El País
“The interplay between immature thirty-somethings, their crazy parents, and their declining grandparents, is at the heart of the book. They each construct the reality that suits them best. Nopca’s portrait of a generation is appealing and well-written.”
—La Vanguardia
First published in the United States in 2021
by Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street, Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
Come On Up was originally published in Catalan in 2015 as Puja a casa
by L’Altra Editorial
Text © 2014 by Jordi Nopca
© L’Altra Editorial
Barcelona, Spain
Translation © 2021 by Mara Faye Lethem
An earlier version of “An Intersectional Conservationist at Heart” was first published as “Una vida ecologista i assembleària” in Literatura de proximitat by AdiA, 2019.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nopca, Jordi, author. | Lethem, Mara, translator.
Title: Come on up / Jordi Nopca ; translated by Mara Faye Lethem.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2021. | “Come On Up was originally published in Catalan in 2015 as Puja a casa by L’Altra Editorial”--Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018881 | ISBN 9781942658801 (paperback ; acid-free paper) |ISBN 9781942658818 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nopca, Jordi---Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PC3942.24.O72 A2 2021 | DDC 849/.936--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018881All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
The publication of this book was also made possible with support from the Institut Ramon Llull.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
♾ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-80-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-81-8
For my grandfather Josep, who will never be entirely gone
CONTENTS
An Intersectional Conservationist at Heart
Don’t Leave
Engagement Ring
Oklahoma Panther
Àngels Quintana and Fèlix Palme Have Problems
A Man with a Future
Cinéma d’Auteur
Swiss Army Knife
We Have Each Other
The Neighbor Ladies
Candles and Robes
Credits and Attributions
AN INTERSECTIONAL CONSERVATIONIST AT HEART
Turning idiots into geniuses, or beech wood into oak, is as difficult as transforming lead into gold.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,
The Waste Books
This is the story of the professional relationship between Victòria, a twenty-six-year-old journalist, and Mr. Biel Auzina, senior professor of aesthetics, essayist, and poet. There is a tangential allusion to a philosopher who’s just died, a mention of the far left, we see the ubiquitousness of motorcycles in this city, and there are appearances by two Sicilian roommates, a translator boyfriend, and a black scorpion that, instead of spending its time in some corner in Senegal, lives in a glass cage in a duplex in the Tres Torres neighborhood of Barcelona.
Long before Victòria had the chance to meet Mr. Auzina, she had skimmed one of his nonfiction books at the library of her journalism school. That was shortly after he was recognized with one of the most important honors in Catalan letters. She took the book over to the table where she was reviewing her notes on radio locution and, when she decided she’d studied enough, had a look at it. Following a prologue in which the author defended a more “intense and persistent” approach to German philosophy, the book devoted chapters to the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Victòria, who had gone to Barcelona’s German school, detected a few typos in his quoting of Goethe’s language. Before putting the book back on the returns cart, she jotted down a few words by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—one of the authors that Auzina devoted fewer pages to—that she found interesting: “Like a great philosophical chatterer, he is concerned not so much with the truth as with the sound of his prose.”
It wasn’t until two years later that Victòria came across the aesthetics professor’s name again. By then, she had finished her degree and was an intern at a local radio station, where neither of her two coworkers had spoken more than two sentences to her. Victòria went home on her motorcycle, just as she did every afternoon, and before greeting anyone, she put her helmet in her bedroom. Her father, who had lost his job six months earlier, was sitting in front of the television, gnawing on a mix of sunflower seeds, corn nuts, and dried chickpeas. Instead of the
news, that day he was watching a documentary, which caught Victòria’s eye. The voice-over spoke of the uptick in cricket sales in China, while the screen showed images of a crowded market in Beijing and a sequence of men clinically studying various species of the insects. The voice-over was slightly overacted, as the commentator joked about the end result of the transaction. “Don’t worry: Crickets aren’t a highly sought-after food item in the Asian giant, not yet,” he allowed, before declaring that the Chinese only bought the crickets as a business investment. “Cricket fighting is all the rage! This one, Ba Jin, has earned six months of back rent for its owner. And this little one, this tiny thing, is the indestructible Mo Yan, one of the most feared crickets in all of Beijing. If its trainer were to sell it, he would ask for more than eight thousand yuans, equivalent to nine hundred euros.” After boasting about their feats, the documentary showed them in action. Fifty-odd people crowded around a ring where the two insects fought. Only one would return to its cage. Ba Jin took out its opponent, Lu Xun, in a matter of seconds. Mo Yan was less efficient: It wound up Gao Xingjian long enough that the bets on its challenger rose, so when tiny Mo Yan took out the other cricket with a couple of lethal movements, its owner’s returns were multiplied.
“You see how vicious that one is?” said her father.
The cricket trainers feed them tofu, liver, and ginger. “These bugs eat better than we do, but they deserve it,” said one. The low-angle shot emphasized his protuberant, decaying teeth.
The documentary flashed back to explain the centuries-old tradition of cricket fighting, which dated to the Tang dynasty (from the seventh to tenth centuries). The only period when it was explicitly banned was during the Cultural Revolution of the sixties. The Communist leaders had deemed it a “bourgeois predilection.” Ten years later, cricket fighting had become accepted again, and now it was one of the most popular sports in the country: It moved hundreds of millions of yuans every year. The betting business grew exponentially. Breeders of certain types could make more than a teacher or a doctor.
“That’s enough of that,” said Victòria’s father, changing the channel.
“No! Dad, that was interesting.”
“The news is about to start.”
Victòria had just come home from work at the radio station. She’d helped edit most of the voice snippets for the evening news program, just as she did every afternoon. She was well acquainted with most of the day’s terrorist attacks, political abuses, and business transactions, which exempted her from the television news programs’ target audience. Despite that, she was feeling too tired to hole up in her bedroom and do her French homework. She remained there beside her father. The last of the featured news stories was the awarding of the national poetry prize to Biel Auzina, who appeared briefly, wearing white-framed glasses and a red scarf wrapped around his neck.
###
Four years later, Victòria again crossed paths with the writer. In the interim, she’d finished a master’s in publishing, and earned the highest certificates in English and French—the Proficiency and the DALF, respectively—and had begun studying Italian. In addition, she’d been an intern at five different media outlets: She went from radio to TV, and from there to the written press, where she felt more comfortable, even though it was the format with the most demanding schedule. She had been a contributor to fashion supplements, emerging news websites, and a cultural weekly, where, in addition to managing various event calendars she had little or no interest in, she was occasionally allowed to do an interview, if the assigned writer couldn’t do it that week. Because the journalist in charge of the books and art section was on temporary leave, Victòria had accrued some confidence in dealing with authors, curators, and gallerists. Eventually, that led to her being offered a more or less stable job at a newspaper: She would start out having to work half days in the office, but would only be able to charge piecemeal and as a freelancer.
“It’s all we can offer you,” she’d been assured by the head of Human Resources the day she first visited the newsroom.
Victòria had ended up in the arts and culture section. Since she had good English, French, and German, they gradually assigned her more and more interviews, which she prepared with excessive professionalism (often from home, in the wee hours of the morning). Even though she sometimes worked fifty hours a week, Victòria never made more than 650 euros a month. The only advantage to earning so little was that she didn’t have to pay self-employment taxes. At least that was what a bureaucrat had told her over the phone, although when it came time to file, she was outraged to find she had to cough up almost 900 euros, when she’d made only 5,542 the whole year.
But before that happened, she’d already moved into an apartment in Sants with Graziella and Ciccina, who were working on biology PhDs at the Universitat de Barcelona. The young women, who were from Sicily and spoke an obscure dialect when talking to each other, rechristened Victòria “Vicky.” It struck her as a fresh, modern option and she started using it for her byline.
It was Vicky and not Victòria who one spring afternoon rode her motorcycle to the Tres Torres neighborhood to interview Mr. Biel Auzina on the occasion of his new book, which interwove memories of his childhood in Majorca with a critique of the early twenty-first-century decline in humanities studies. Victòria had read it almost entirely the night before, despite the raucous noises coming from the kitchen as Ciccina prepared her lunches for the whole week.
She made a habit of arriving to her interviews fifteen minutes early. She liked to survey the territory in search of some detail she could include as part of the introduction to the piece. The apartment building where Mr. Auzina lived was only moderately luxurious but slightly intimidating, like a military base on the outskirts of a small town. The doorman who came out to receive her as she was looking for the doorbells was very polite.
“Good afternoon. Mr. Auzina is upstairs with the photographer. Allow me to take you up.”
He opened the elevator door and escorted her to the author’s apartment. She was greeted by a woman dressed in black and wearing a white mobcap, who led her to a room where some of Auzina’s academic honors hung on a wall alongside some twenty-odd photos of him with illustrious figures such as Joseph Brodsky, Harold Pinter, V. S. Naipaul, and Marc Fumaroli. There were plaques beneath each of the images listing not only all the subjects but also the location and year the photo was taken, allowing Victòria to jot down half a dozen of those names that rang a vague bell, to mention during the interview, in order to shift the conversation about his latest publication into a dimension more akin to gossip.
Mr. Auzina made his entrance into the room. He was wearing the same red scarf he’d worn the day he’d learned he’d won the national poetry prize, but his eyeglasses were different: Attuned to fashion, he had returned to the subtlety of metal frames.
“Good afternoon,” he said, extending his hand. “Come, let us go to the living room; we’ll be more comfortable there.”
Victòria followed him to a leather sofa but opted to sit on the pouf beside the coffee table, which teemed with catalogs from American museum retrospectives.
“Are you sure you’re okay there?” Mr. Auzina repeated a couple of times.
When she had the tape recorder set up, Victòria asked him the requisite question—“Can I record our conversation?”—and after he agreed, she began the interview.
They spoke for almost an hour. The first half was devoted exclusively to his new book. Mr. Auzina was that type of interview subject who responded to every comment with long dissertations. Victòria hit the right notes: He was impressed when, after quoting Schleiermacher, she reminded him that he had mentioned the philosopher in that first essay she’d read by him; later, when she referenced the pages where Auzina described his father’s funeral, she managed to bring a few tears to his eyes, which then snaked down his cheeks and fell—plop, plop—onto the leather sofa.
“Forgive me,” she said, even though she knew that provoking an emo
tional response in her interview subject could make him lower his guard, as proved to be the case now.
During the second half hour, Victòria managed to get Mr. Auzina to sing the praises of Harold Pinter’s plays, based on the evening they had spent together twenty years earlier, as well as discredit V. S. Naipaul by recalling how poorly he treated the waitresses in the restaurant in New York where they’d dined shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Auzina left out the conclusion of that encounter—his return to the hotel, the call to a prostitute, and the fifteen minutes of lackluster sex inside the room’s empty bathtub—instead, he spoke for a few minutes about his connection to the ideals of the far left.
“I’ve always been a bit radical,” he admitted before quoting some French ideologues from the seventies, quotes that Victòria didn’t have time to jot down in her notebook. “I’m an intersectional conservationist at heart; I don’t think that will ever change.”
When they were done, Mr. Auzina wanted to give her a dedicated copy of one of his first poetry collections. They went to his library, and she was impressed to find a vast room with some five thousand volumes, organized alphabetically by subject. The bookcases were indubitably sumptuous, as were the desk, chair, and a leather armchair that stood in one corner, beside a shaded lamp supported by a metallic gray stand that was reminiscent of Mr. Auzina’s eyeglasses.
“This is my little cave,” he said. “This study is where I do all my bibliographic consultations.”
Victòria was surprised he didn’t say, “This is where I read.” She asked him if he also wrote there.
“No! Never. It’s too noisy here; my wife comes in and out constantly, asking me about trifling matters. I have a small studio on Carrer de Dalmases. From the window I can see the Sarrià cemetery. …”
Mr. Auzina walked over to the case that held all his own work (there were about thirty copies on each shelf), found his first book of poems, and wrote a dedication, using a Montblanc pen that gleamed with the exuberance of a precious gemstone.