The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  I must have rattled on longer than I should have, for no sooner did Alma announce the title of the next movie we were going to see (Report from the Anti-World) than a door slammed somewhere in the building. We were just climbing to our feet at that point—brushing the crumbs off our clothes, taking a last swig of iced tea from the thermos, getting ready to go back inside. We heard the sound of tennis shoes flapping against the linoleum. A couple of moments later, Juan appeared at the end of the hall, and when he started coming toward us at a half trot—more running than walking—we both knew that Frieda had returned.

  For the next little while, it was as if I wasn’t there anymore. Juan and Alma talked to each other in silence, communicating in a flurry of hand signals, sweeping arm movements, and emphatic shakes and nods of the head. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but as the remarks flew back and forth between them, I could see that Alma was becoming more and more upset. Her gestures turned harsh, truculent, almost aggressive in their denial of what Juan was telling her. Juan threw up his hands in a pose of surrender (Don’t blame me, he seemed to be saying, I’m only the messenger), but Alma lashed out at him again, and his eyes clouded over with hostility. He pounded his fist in his palm, then turned and pointed a finger at my face. It wasn’t a conversation anymore. It was an argument, and the argument was suddenly about me.

  I kept on watching, kept on trying to understand what they were talking about, but I couldn’t penetrate the code, couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Then Juan left, and as he marched down the hall on his stocky, diminutive legs, Alma explained what had happened. Frieda got back ten minutes ago, she said. She wants to start in right away.

  That was awfully fast, I said.

  Hector won’t be cremated until five this afternoon. She didn’t want to hang around Albuquerque that long, so she decided to come home. She plans to pick up the ashes tomorrow morning.

  What were you and Juan arguing about, then? I had no idea what was going on, but he pointed his finger at me. I don’t like it when people point their finger at me.

  We were talking about you.

  So I gathered. But what do I have to do with Frieda’s plans? I’m just a visitor.

  I thought you understood.

  I don’t understand sign language, Alma.

  But you saw that I was angry.

  Of course I did. But I still don’t know why.

  Frieda doesn’t want you around. It’s all too private, she says, and it isn’t a good time for strangers.

  You mean she’s booting me off the ranch?

  Not in so many words. But that’s the gist of it. She wants you to leave tomorrow. The plan is to drop you off at the airport on our way to Albuquerque in the morning.

  But she’s the one who invited me. Doesn’t she remember that?

  Hector was alive then. Now he’s not. Circumstances have changed.

  Well, maybe she has a point. I came here to watch movies, didn’t I? If there aren’t any movies to watch, there’s probably no reason for me to stay. I got to see one of them. Now I can watch the others burn up in the fire, and then I’ll be on my way.

  That’s just it. She doesn’t want you to see that either. According to what Juan just told me, it’s none of your business.

  Oh. Now I see why you lost your temper.

  It has nothing to do with you, David. It’s about me. She knows I want you there. We talked about it this morning, and now she’s broken her promise. I’m so pissed off, I could punch her in the face.

  And where am I supposed to hide myself while everyone’s at the barbecue?

  In my house. She said you could stay in my house. But I’m going to talk to her. I’ll make her change her mind.

  Don’t bother. If she doesn’t want me there, I can’t stand on my rights and make a fuss, can I? I don’t have any rights. It’s Frieda’s land, and I have to do what she says.

  Then I won’t go either. She can burn the damn films with Juan and Conchita.

  Of course you’ll go. It’s the last chapter of your book, Alma, and you have to be there to see it happen. You have to stick it out to the end.

  I wanted you to be there, too. It won’t be the same if you’re not with me.

  Fourteen prints and negatives are going to make a hell of a fire. Lots of smoke, lots of flame. With any luck, I’ll be able to see it from the window of your house.

  As it turned out, I did see the fire, but I saw more smoke than flame, and because the windows were open in Alma’s little house, I smelled more than I saw. The burning celluloid had an acrid, stinging odor, and the airborne chemicals hovered in the atmosphere long after the smoke had drifted away. According to what Alma told me that evening, it took the four of them over an hour to haul the films out of the underground storage room. Then they strapped the cans onto hand trucks and wheeled them over the rocky ground to an area just behind the sound stage. With the help of newspapers and kerosene, they lit fires in two oil drums—one for the prints and the other for the negatives. The old nitrate stock burned easily, but the films from after 1951, which had been printed on tougher, less flammable triacetate-based stocks, had trouble igniting. They had to unspool the films from their reels and feed them into the fire one by one, Alma said, and that took time, much longer than anyone had anticipated. They had guessed that they would be finished at around three o’clock, but in point of fact they kept on working until six.

  I spent those hours alone in her house, trying not to resent my exile. I had put a good face on it in front of Alma, but the truth was that I was just as angry as she was. Frieda’s behavior had been unforgivable. You don’t ask someone to your house and then disinvite him once he’s there. And if you do, at least you offer an explanation, and not through the intermediary of a deaf-and-dumb servant, who delivers the message to someone else while pointing a finger at your face. I knew that Frieda was distraught, that she was living through a day of storms and cataclysmic sorrows, but much as I wanted to make excuses for her, I couldn’t help feeling hurt. What was I doing there? Why had Alma been sent to Vermont to drag me back at gunpoint if they didn’t want to see me? Frieda was the one who had written the letters, after all. She was the one who had asked me to come to New Mexico and watch Hector’s films. According to Alma, it had taken her months to persuade them to invite me. I had assumed that Hector had resisted the idea and that Alma and Frieda had eventually talked him into it. Now, after eighteen hours at the ranch, I was beginning to suspect that I had been wrong.

  If not for the insulting way I was treated, I probably wouldn’t have given these matters a second thought. After Alma and I finished our conversation in the post-production building, we packed up the remains of our lunch and walked over to her adobe cottage, which was set on a small rise of land about three hundred yards from the main house. Alma opened the door, and sitting at our feet, just beyond the edge of the sill, was my travel bag. I had left it in the guest room of the other house that morning, and now someone (probably Conchita) had carried it over on Frieda’s orders and deposited it on the floor of Alma’s place. It struck me as an arrogant, imperious gesture. Again, I pretended to laugh it off (Well, I said, at least that spares me the trouble of having to do it myself), but underneath my flippant remark, I was boiling with rage. Alma left to join the others, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes I wandered around the house, going in and out of rooms, trying to control my temper. Presently, I heard the sound of the hand trucks clattering in the distance, the clang of metal scraping against stone, the intermittent noise of stacked-up film cans clicking and vibrating against one another. The auto-da-fé was about to begin. I went into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and turned on the faucets of the tub at full blast.

  Soaking in the warm water, I let my mind drift for a while, slowly rehearsing the facts as I understood them. Then, turning them around and looking at them from a different angle, I tried to accommodate those facts to the events that had taken place in the past hour: Juan’s belligerent d
ialogue with Alma, Alma’s vituperative response to Frieda’s message (she’s broken her promise … I could punch her in the face), my expulsion from the ranch. It was a purely speculative line of reasoning, but when I thought back to what had happened the night before (the graciousness of Hector’s welcome, his eagerness to show me his films) and then compared it to what had happened since, I began to wonder if Frieda had not been opposed to my visit all along. I wasn’t forgetting that she was the one who had invited me to Tierra del Sueño, but perhaps she had written those letters against her better judgment, buckling in to Hector’s demands after months of quarrels and disagreements. If that was so, then ordering me off her land did not represent a sudden change of heart. It was merely something she could get away with now that Hector was dead.

  Until then, I had thought of them as equal partners. Alma had talked about their marriage at some length, and not once had it occurred to me that their motives might have been different, that their thinking had not been in perfect harmony. They had made a pact in 1939 to produce films that would never be shown to the public, and they had both embraced the idea that the work they did together should ultimately be destroyed. Those were the conditions of Hector’s return to filmmaking. It was a brutal interdiction, and yet only by sacrificing the one thing that would have given his work meaning—the pleasure of sharing it with others—could he justify his decision to do that work in the first place. The films, then, were a form of penance, an acknowledgment that his role in the accidental murder of Brigid O’Fallon was a sin that could never be pardoned. I am a ridiculous man. God has played many jokes on me. One form of punishment had given way to another, and in the tangled, self-torturing logic of his decision, Hector had continued to pay off his debts to a God he refused to believe in. The bullet that tore apart his chest in the Sandusky bank had made it possible for him to marry Frieda. The death of his son had made it possible for him to return to filmmaking. In neither instance, however, had he been absolved of his responsibility for what had happened on the night of January 14, 1929. Neither the physical suffering caused by Knox’s gun nor the mental suffering caused by Taddy’s death had been terrible enough to set him free. Make films, yes. Pour every ounce of your talents and energies into making them. Make them as though your life depended on it, and then, once your life is over, see to it that they are destroyed. You are forbidden to leave any traces behind you.

  Frieda had gone along with all this, but it couldn’t have been the same for her. She hadn’t committed a crime; she wasn’t dragged down by the weight of a guilty conscience; she wasn’t pursued by the memory of putting a dead girl into the trunk of a car and burying her body in the California mountains. Frieda was innocent, and yet she accepted Hector’s terms, putting aside her own ambitions to devote herself to the creation of work whose central aim was nothingness. It would have been understandable to me if she had watched him from a distance—indulging Hector in his obsessions, perhaps, pitying him for his mania, yet refusing to get involved in the mechanics of the enterprise itself. But Frieda was his accomplice, his staunchest defender, and she was up to her elbows in it from the start. Not only did she talk Hector into making films again (threatening to leave him if he didn’t), but it was her money that financed the operation. She sewed costumes, drew storyboards, cut film, designed sets. You don’t work that hard at something unless you enjoy it, unless you feel that your efforts have some value—but what possible joy could she have found from spending all those years in the service of nothing? At least Hector, trapped in his psycho-religious battle between desire and self-abnegation, could comfort himself with the thought that there was a purpose to what he was doing. He didn’t make films in order to destroy them—but in spite of it. They were two separate actions, and the best part of it was that he wouldn’t have to be around to see the second one happen. He would already be dead by the time his films went into the fire, and it would no longer make any difference to him. For Frieda, however, the actions must have been one and the same, two steps in a single, unified process of creation and destruction. All along, she was the one who had been destined to light the match and bring their work to an end, and that thought must have grown in her as the years went by until it overpowered everything else. Little by little, it had become an aesthetic principle in its own right. Even as she continued working on the films with Hector, she must have felt that the work was no longer about making films. It was about making something in order to destroy it. That was the work, and until all evidence of the work had been destroyed, the work would not exist. It would come into being only at the moment of its annihilation—and then, as the smoke rose up into the hot New Mexican day, it would be gone.

  There was something chilling and beautiful about this idea. I understood how seductive it must have been for her, and yet once I allowed myself to look at it through Frieda’s eyes, to experience the full power of that ecstatic negation, I also understood why she wanted to get rid of me. My presence tainted the purity of the moment. The films were supposed to die a virgin death, unseen by anyone from the outside world. It was bad enough that I had been allowed to see one of them, but now that the articles of Hector’s will were about to go into effect, she could insist that the ceremony be conducted in the way she had always imagined it. The films had been born in secrecy, and they were supposed to vanish in secrecy as well. Strangers weren’t permitted to watch, and although Alma and Hector had mounted a last-minute effort to bring me into the inner circle, Frieda had never viewed me as anything but a stranger. Alma was part of the family, and therefore she had been anointed as the official witness. She was the court historian, so to speak, and after the last member of her parents’ generation was dead, the only memories to survive of them would be the ones recorded in her book. I was supposed to have been the witness of the witness, the independent observer brought in to confirm the accuracy of the witness’s statements. It was a small role to play in such a large drama, and Frieda had cut me out of the script. As far as she was concerned, I had been unnecessary from the start.

  I sat in the tub until the water grew cold, then wrapped myself in a couple of towels and lingered for another twenty or thirty minutes—shaving, dressing, combing my hair. I found it pleasant to be in Alma’s bathroom, standing among the tubes and jars that lined the shelves of the medicine cabinet, that crowded the top of the small wooden chest by the window. The red toothbrush in its slot above the sink, the lipsticks in their gold and plastic containers, the mascara brush and eyeliner pencil, the box of tampons, the aspirins, the dental floss, the Chanel No. 5 eau de cologne, the prescription bottle of antimicrobial cleanser. Each one was a sign of intimacy, a mark of solitude and self-reflection. She put the pills into her mouth, rubbed the creams into her skin, ran the combs and brushes through her hair, and every morning she came into this room and stood in front of the same mirror I was looking into now. What did I know about her? Almost nothing, and yet I was certain that I didn’t want to lose her, that I was ready to put up a fight in order to see her again after I left the ranch in the morning. My problem was ignorance. I had no doubt that there was trouble in the household, but I didn’t know Alma well enough to be able to measure the true extent of her anger against Frieda, and because I couldn’t do that, I didn’t know to what degree I should be worried about what was happening. The night before, I had watched them together at the kitchen table, and there had been no trace of conflict then. I remembered the solicitude in Alma’s voice, the delicate request from Frieda for Alma to spend the night in the main house, the sense of a familial bond. It wasn’t unusual for people that close to lash out at each other, to say things in the heat of the moment they would later come to regret—but Alma’s outburst had been particularly intense, simmering with threats of violence that were rare (in my experience) among women. I’m so pissed off, I could punch her in the face. How often had she said that kind of thing? Was she prone to delivering such rash, hyperbolic statements, or did this represent a new turn in her relations w
ith Frieda, a sudden break after years of silent animosity? Had I known more, I wouldn’t have had to ask the question. I would have understood that Alma’s words were meant to be taken seriously, that their very extravagance proved that things were already beginning to fly out of control.

  I finished up in the bathroom, then continued my aimless travels around the house. It was a small, compact place, sturdily built, somewhat clumsy in design, but in spite of the narrow dimensions, Alma seemed to live in only part of it. One room in the back was given over entirely to storage. Cardboard boxes were stacked up along one wall and half of another, and a dozen or so discarded objects were strewn about the floor: a chair with a missing leg, a rusted tricycle, a fifty-year-old manual typewriter, a black-and-white portable TV with snapped-off rabbit ears, a pile of stuffed animals, a Dictaphone, and several partially used cans of paint. Another room had nothing in it at all. No furniture, no mattress, not even a lightbulb. A large, intricate cobweb dangled from a corner of the ceiling. Three or four dead flies were trapped inside, but their bodies were so desiccated, so nearly reduced to weightless flecks of dust, that I figured the spider had abandoned her web and set up shop somewhere else.