The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  Eventually, Frieda came downstairs and joined us at the kitchen table. Conchita was washing a plate at the sink (standing on a footstool, working with grown-up efficiency in her seven-year-old’s body), and the moment she caught sight of Frieda, she gave her a long, searching look, as if waiting for instructions. Frieda nodded, and Conchita put down the plate, dried off her hands with a dish towel, and left the room. Nothing had been said, but it was clear that she was going upstairs to sit with Hector, that they were watching over him in shifts.

  By my reckoning, Frieda Spelling was seventy-nine years old. After listening to Alma’s descriptions of her, I was prepared for someone ferocious—a blunt, intimidating woman, a larger-than-life character—but the person who sat down with us that evening was subdued, soft-spoken, almost reserved in her manner. No lipstick or makeup, no effort to do anything with her hair, but still feminine, still beautiful in some pared-down, incorporeal way. As I continued to look at her, I began to sense that she was one of those rare people in whom mind ultimately wins out over matter. Age doesn’t diminish these people. It makes them old, but it doesn’t alter who they are, and the longer they go on living, the more fully and implacably they incarnate themselves.

  Forgive the confusion, Professor Zimmer, she said. You’ve come at a difficult time. Hector had a bad morning, but when I told him that you and Alma were on your way, he insisted on staying up. I hope it wasn’t too much for him.

  We had a good talk, I said. I think he’s happy I came.

  Happy might not be the word for it, but he’s something, something very intense. You’ve created quite a stir in this house, Professor. I’m sure you’re aware of that.

  Before I could answer her, Alma broke in and changed the subject. Have you been in touch with Huyler? she asked. His breathing doesn’t sound good, you know. It’s much worse than it was yesterday.

  Frieda sighed, then rubbed her hands over her face—exhausted from too little sleep, from too much agitation and worry. I’m not going to call Huyler, she said (talking more to herself than to Alma, as if repeating an argument she had gone through a dozen times before), because the only thing Huyler will say is Bring him to the hospital, and Hector won’t go to the hospital. He’s sick of hospitals. He made me promise, and I gave him my word. No more hospitals, Alma. So what’s the point in calling Huyler?

  Hector has pneumonia, Alma said. He has one lung, and he can barely breathe anymore. That’s why you have to call Huyler.

  He wants to die in the house, Frieda said. He’s been telling me that every hour for the past two days, and I’m not going to go against him. I gave him my word.

  I’ll drive him to Saint Joseph’s myself if you’re too tired, Alma said.

  Not without his permission, Frieda said. And we can’t talk to him now because he’s asleep. We’ll try in the morning, if you like, but I’m not going to do it without his permission.

  As the two women went on talking, I looked up and saw that Juan was perched on a footstool in front of the stove, scrambling eggs in a frying pan. When the food was ready, he transferred it onto a plate and carried it over to where Frieda was sitting. The eggs were hot and yellow, steaming up from the blue china in a swirl of vapor—as if the smell of those eggs had become visible. Frieda looked at them for a moment, but she didn’t seem to understand what they were. They could have been a pile of rocks, or an ectoplasm that had dropped down from outer space, but they weren’t food, and even if she did recognize them as food, she had no intention of putting them in her mouth. She poured herself a glass of wine instead, but after one small sip, she put the glass down again. Very delicately, she pushed the glass away from her, and then, using her other hand, she pushed away the eggs.

  Bad timing, she said to me. I was hoping to be able to talk to you, to get to know you a little bit, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to be possible.

  There’s always tomorrow, I said.

  Maybe, she said. Right now, I’m only thinking about now.

  You should lie down, Frieda, Alma said. When was the last time you slept?

  I can’t remember. The day before yesterday, I think. The night before you left.

  Well, I’m back now, Alma said, and David’s here, too. You don’t have to take on everything yourself.

  I don’t, Frieda said, I haven’t. The little people have been an enormous help, but I have to be there to talk to him. He’s too weak to sign anymore.

  Get some rest, Alma said. I’ll stay with him myself. David and I can do it together.

  I hope you don’t mind, Frieda said, but I’d feel much better if you stayed here in the house tonight. Professor Zimmer can sleep in the cottage, but I’d rather have you upstairs with me. Just in case something happens. Is that all right? I’ve already had Conchita make up the bed in the big guest room.

  That’s fine, Alma said, but David doesn’t have to sleep in the cottage. He can stay with me.

  Oh? Frieda said, utterly caught off guard. And what does Professor Zimmer say about that?

  Professor Zimmer approves of the plan, I said.

  Oh? she said again, and for the first time since she’d entered the kitchen, Frieda smiled. It was a terrific smile, I felt, full of amazement and stupefaction, and as she looked back and forth from Alma’s face to my face, the smile continued to grow. My God, she said, you two work fast, don’t you? Who would have expected that?

  No one, I was about to say, but before I could get the words out of my mouth, the telephone rang. It was a bizarre interruption, and because it came so quickly after Frieda said the word that, there seemed to be a connection between the two events, as if the telephone had sounded in direct response to the word. It broke the mood entirely, extinguished the gleam of mirth that had been spreading across her face. Frieda stood up, and as I watched her walk to the phone (which was hanging on the wall beside the open doorway, five or six steps to her right), it occurred to me that the purpose of the call was to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to smile, that smiling wasn’t permitted in a house of death. It was a crazy thought, but that didn’t mean my intuition was wrong. I had been on the point of saying No one, and when Frieda picked up the phone and asked who it was, it turned out that no one was there. Hello, she said, who is this? and when no one answered her question, she asked it again and then hung up. She turned to us with an anguished look on her face. No one, she said. Goddamn bloody no one.

  Hector died a few hours later, sometime between three and four in the morning. Alma and I were asleep when it happened, naked under the covers in the guest room bed. We had made love, talked, made love again, and I can’t be sure when our bodies finally gave out on us. Alma had traveled across the country twice in two days, had driven hundreds of miles to and from airports, and still she was able to rouse herself from the depths of sleep when Juan knocked on our door. I wasn’t. I slept through all the noise and commotion and wound up missing everything. After years of insomnia and restless nights, I had finally slept soundly, and it happened on the one night when I should have been awake.

  I didn’t open my eyes until ten o’clock. Alma was sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking my cheek with her hand, whispering my name in a calm but urgent voice, and even after I had brushed out the cobwebs and lifted myself onto my elbow, she didn’t tell me the news for another ten or fifteen minutes. There were kisses first, followed by some very intimate talk about the state of our feelings, and then she handed me a mug of coffee, which she allowed me to drink all the way to the bottom before starting in. I have always admired her for having the strength and the discipline to do that. By not talking about Hector right away, she was telling me that she wasn’t going to let us drown in the rest of the story. We had begun our own story now, and it was just as important to her as the other—which was her life, her whole life up to the moment she had met me.

  She was glad that I’d slept through it, she said. It had given her a chance to be alone for a while and to shed some tears, to get the worst of it behind her b
efore the day started. It was going to be a rough day, she continued, a rough and eventful day for both of us. Frieda was on the warpath—charging forward on all fronts, getting ready to burn everything as quickly as she could.

  I thought we had twenty-four hours, I said.

  That’s what I thought, too. But Frieda says it has to be within twenty-four hours. We had a big fight about that before she left.

  Left? You mean she’s not at the ranch?

  It was an incredible scene. Ten minutes after Hector died, Frieda was on the phone, talking to someone at the Vista Verde Mortuary in Albuquerque. She asked them to send out a car as soon as possible. They got here at around seven, seven-thirty, which means they should almost be there by now. She plans to have Hector cremated today.

  Can she do that? Don’t you have to go through a lot of formalities first?

  All she needs is a death certificate. Once the doctor examines the body and says that Hector died of natural causes, she’ll be free to do what she wants.

  She must have had this in mind all along. She just didn’t tell you.

  It’s grotesque. We’ll be out in the screening room watching Hector’s films, and Hector’s body will be in an oven, turning into a mound of ashes.

  And then she’ll come back, and the films will turn into ashes, too.

  We have only a few hours. There isn’t going to be enough time to watch them all, but we might be able to get through two or three if we start now.

  It’s not much, is it?

  She was ready to burn them all this morning. At least I managed to talk her out of that.

  You make it sound as if she’s lost her mind.

  Her husband is dead, and the first thing she has to do is destroy his work, destroy everything they made together. If she stopped to think, she wouldn’t be able to go ahead with it. Of course she’s out of her mind. She made this promise almost fifty years ago, and today’s the day she has to carry it out. If I were in her shoes, I’d want to get it over with as fast as I could. Get it over with—and then collapse. That’s why Hector gave her only twenty-four hours. He didn’t want there to be any time for second thoughts.

  Alma stood up then, and as she walked around the room opening the venetian blinds, I slid out of bed and put on my clothes. There were a hundred more things to say, but we would have to put them off until after we had watched the films. Sunlight rushed through the windows as Alma yanked up the blinds, filling the room with a dazzle of midmorning brightness. She was wearing blue jeans, I remember, and a white cotton sweater. No shoes or socks, and the tips of her splendid little toes were painted red. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out like this. I had been counting on Hector to keep himself alive for me, to give me a string of slow, contemplative days at the ranch with nothing to do but watch his films and sit with him in the darkness of his old man’s room. It was hard to choose between disappointments, to decide which frustration was worse: never to be able to talk to him again—or to know that those films would be burned before I’d had a chance to see them all.

  We passed Hector’s room on the way downstairs, and when I looked inside I saw the little people stripping the sheets off the bed. The room was entirely bare now. The objects that had cluttered the surfaces of the bureau and the bedside table were gone (pill bottles, drinking glasses, books, thermometers, towels), and except for the blankets and pillows strewn about the floor, there was nothing to suggest that a man had died in there only seven hours ago. I caught them just as they were about to remove the bottom sheet. They were standing on opposite sides of the bed, hands poised in midair, getting ready to pull down from the two top corners in unison. The effort had to be coordinated because they were so small (their heads barely came above the mattress), and as the sheet momentarily billowed up from the bed, I saw that it was smudged with various stains and discolorations, the last intimate signs of Hector’s presence in the world. We all die leaking out piss and blood, shitting ourselves like newborn children, suffocating in our own mucus. A second later, the sheet flattened out again, and the deaf-and-dumb servants began walking the length of the bed, moving from top to bottom as the sheet doubled over itself and then silently fell to the floor.

  Alma had prepared sandwiches and drinks for us to carry over to the screening room. As she went into the kitchen to load up the picnic basket, I wandered around downstairs, looking at the art on the walls. There must have been three dozen paintings and drawings in the living room alone, another dozen in the hall: bright, undulating abstractions, landscapes, portraits, sketches in pen and ink. Nothing was signed, but they all seemed to be the work of one person, which meant that Frieda must have been the artist. I stopped in front of a small drawing that was hanging above the record cabinet. There wasn’t going to be enough time to look at everything, so I decided to concentrate on that one and ignore the rest. It was an overhead view of a young child: a two-year-old sprawled out on his back with his eyes closed, evidently asleep in his crib. The paper had turned yellow and was crumbling a bit around the edges, and when I saw how old it was, I felt certain that the child in the picture was Tad, Hector and Frieda’s dead son. Naked, loose-jointed arms and legs; naked torso; a bunched-up cotton diaper held together with a safety pin; a suggestion of the crib bars just beyond the crown of the head. The lines had a swift, spur-of-the-moment feel to them—a whirl of pulsing, confident strokes that had probably been executed in under five minutes. I tried to imagine the scene, to work my way back into the moment when the point of the pencil had first touched the paper. A mother is sitting next to her child as he takes his afternoon nap. She is reading a book, but when she glances up and sees him in that unguarded pose—head flung back and lolling to one side—she digs a pencil out of her pocket and begins to draw him. Since she has no paper, she uses the last page of the book, which happens to be blank. When the drawing is finished, she tears the page out of the book and puts it away—or else she leaves it there and forgets all about it. And if she forgets, years will go by before she opens the book again and rediscovers the lost drawing. Only then will she clip the brittle sheet from the binding, frame it, and hang it on the wall. There was no way for me to know when this might have happened. It could have been forty years ago, and it could have been last month, but whenever she had stumbled across that drawing of her son, the boy was already dead—perhaps long dead, perhaps dead for more years than I had been alive.

  After Alma returned from the kitchen, she took my hand and led me out of the living room into an adjoining corridor with whitewashed stucco walls and a red slate floor. There’s something I want you to see, she said. I know we’re pressed for time, but it won’t take more than a minute.

  We walked to the end of the hall, passing two or three doors along the way, and then stopped in front of the last door. Alma put down the lunch basket and pulled out a fistful of keys from her pocket. There must have been fifteen or twenty keys on that ring, but she went straight to the one she wanted and slipped it into the lock. Hector’s study, she said. He spent more time in here than anywhere else. The ranch was his world, but this was the center of that world.

  It was filled with books. That was the first thing I noticed when I went in—how many books there were. Three of the four walls were lined with shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and every inch of those shelves was crammed with books. There were further clusters and piles of them on chairs and tables, on the rug, on the desk. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new books and old books, books in English, Spanish, French, and Italian. The desk was a long wooden table in the middle of the room—a twin to the table that stood in the kitchen—and among the titles I remember seeing there was My Last Sigh, by Luis Buñuell. Because the book was lying facedown and open just in front of the chair, I wondered if Hector hadn’t been reading it on the day he fell and broke his leg—which was the last day he had spent any time in his study. I was about to pick it up to see where he had left off, but Alma took my hand again and led me over to the shelves in the back corner of the r
oom. I think you’ll find this interesting, she said. She pointed to a row of books several inches above her head (but exactly at my eye level), and I saw that all of them had been written by French authors: Baudelaire, Balzac, Proust, La Fontaine. A little to the left, Alma said, and as I moved my eyes to the left, scanning the spines for whatever it was she wanted to show me, I suddenly spotted the familiar green and gold of the two-volume Pléiade edition of Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe.

  It shouldn’t have made any difference to me, but it did. Chateaubriand wasn’t an obscure writer, but it moved me to know that Hector had read the book, that he had entered the same labyrinth of memories that I had been wandering in for the past eighteen months. It was another point of contact, somehow, another link in the chain of accidental encounters and curious sympathies that had drawn me to him from the beginning. I pulled the first volume from the shelf and opened the book. I knew that Alma and I had to be on our way, but I couldn’t resist the urge to run my hands over a couple of pages, to touch some of the words that Hector had read in the quiet of this room. The book fell open somewhere in the middle, and I saw that one of the sentences had been underlined faintly in pencil. Les moments de crise produisent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes. Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don’t begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall.

  We hurried out into the hot summer morning with our sandwiches and cold drinks. One day earlier, we had been driving through the wreckage of a New England rainstorm. Now we were in the desert, walking under a sky without clouds, breathing in the thin, juniper-scented air. I saw Hector’s trees off to the right, and as we maneuvered our way around the edge of the garden, cicadas clanged in the tall grass. Splashes of yarrow, fleabane, and bedstraw. I felt hyper-alert, filled with a kind of mad resolve, a jumbled-up state of fear, expectation, and happiness—as if I had three minds, and they were all working at once. A giant wall of mountains stood in the remote distance; a hawk circled overhead; a blue butterfly landed on a stone. Less than a hundred yards after setting out from the house, I could already feel sweat gathering on my forehead. Alma pointed to a long, one-story adobe building with cracked cement steps and weeds growing in front of it. The actors and technicians had slept there while films were in production, she said, but the windows were boarded up now and the water and electricity had been turned off. The post-production complex was another fifty yards ahead, but it was the building beyond that one that caught my attention. The soundstage was an enormous structure, a sprawling cube of whiteness glinting in the sun, and it looked odd to me in those surroundings, more like an airplane hangar or a truck depot than a place for shooting films. On an impulse, I squeezed Alma’s hand, then shoved my fingers in with hers and laced them together. What are we going to watch first? I asked.