The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  That left the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the study. I wanted to sit down and read Alma’s book, but I didn’t feel I had the right to do that without her permission. She had written more than six hundred pages by then, but those pages were still in rough-draft form, and unless a writer specifically asks you to comment on a work in progress, you aren’t allowed to peek. Alma had pointed to the manuscript earlier (There’s the monster, she had said), but she hadn’t mentioned anything about reading it, and I didn’t want to begin my life with her by betraying a trust. Instead, I killed time by looking at everything else in the four rooms she inhabited, examining the food in the refrigerator, the clothes in the bedroom closet, and the collections of books, records, and videos in the living room. I learned that she drank skim milk and buttered her bread with unsalted butter, favored the color blue (mostly in dark shades), and had wide-ranging tastes in literature and music—a girl after my own heart. Dashiell Hammett and André Breton; Pergolesi and Mingus; Verdi, Wittgenstein, and Villon. In one corner, I found all the books I had published while Helen was still alive—the two volumes of criticism, the four books of translated poems—and I realized that I had never seen all six of them together outside of my own house. On another shelf, there were books by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau. I pulled out a paperback selection of Hawthorne’s stories and found “The Birthmark,” which I read in front of the bookcase on the cold tile floor, trying to imagine what Alma must have felt when she’d read it as a young girl. Just as I was coming to the end (The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time …), I caught my first whiff of kerosene wafting in through a window at the back of the house.

  The smell drove me a little crazy, and I immediately climbed to my feet and started walking again. I went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water, and then continued on into Alma’s study, where I paced around in circles for ten or fifteen minutes, fighting off the urge to read her manuscript. If I couldn’t do anything to prevent Hector’s films from being destroyed, at least I could try to understand why it was happening. None of the answers given to me so far had come close to explaining it. I had done my best to follow the argument, to penetrate the thinking that had led them to such a grim and merciless position, but now that the fires had been lit, it suddenly struck me as absurd, pointless, horrible. The answers were in the book, the reasons were in the book, the origins of the idea that had led to this moment were in the book. I sat down at Alma’s desk. The manuscript was just to the left of the computer—an immense pile of pages with a stone resting on top to keep the pages from blowing away. I removed the stone, and the words underneath it read: The Afterlife of Hector Mann, by Alma Grund. I turned the page, and the next thing I came upon was an epigraph written by Luis Buñuel. The passage was from My Last Sigh, the same book I had stumbled across in Hector’s study that morning. A while later, the quotation began, I suggested that we burn the negative on the place du Tertre in Montmartre, something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact, I’d still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my films go up in flames. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference. (Curiously, however, the surrealists vetoed my suggestion.)

  That broke the spell somewhat. I had seen some of Buñuel’s films in the sixties and seventies, but I wasn’t familiar with his autobiography, and it took me a few moments to ponder what I had just read. I glanced up, and by turning my attention away from Alma’s manuscript—however briefly—I was given time to regroup, to stop myself before I went any further. I put the first page back where it had been, then covered up the title with the stone. As I did so, I edged forward in my chair, changing my position enough to be able to see something I hadn’t noticed before: a small green notebook lying on the desk, midway between the manuscript and the wall. It was the size of a school composition book, and from the battered state of the cover and the nicks and tears along the cloth spine, I gathered that it was quite old. Old enough to be one of Hector’s journals, I said to myself—which was exactly what it turned out to be.

  I spent the next four hours in the living room, sitting in an ancient club chair with the notebook on my lap, reading through it twice from beginning to end. There were ninety-six pages in all, and they covered approximately a year and a half—from the autumn of 1930 to the spring of 1932—starting with an entry that described one of Hector’s English lessons with Nora and concluding with a passage about a nighttime walk in Sandusky several days after he confessed his guilt to Frieda. If I had been harboring any doubts about the story Alma had told me, they were dispelled by what I read in that journal. Hector in his own words was the same Hector she had talked about on the plane, the same tortured soul who had run from the Northwest, had come close to killing himself in Montana, Chicago, and Cleveland, had succumbed to the degradations of a six-month alliance with Sylvia Meers, had been shot in a Sandusky bank and had lived. He wrote in a small, spidery hand, often crossing out phrases and writing over them in pencil, misspelling words, smearing ink, and because he wrote on both sides of the page, it wasn’t always easy to make out what he had written. But I managed. Little by little, I think I got most of it, and each time I deciphered another paragraph, the facts tallied with the ones in Alma’s account, the details matched. Using the notebook she had given me, I copied out a few of the significant entries, transcribing them in full so as to have a record of Hector’s exact words. Among them were his last conversation with Red O’Fallon at the Bluebell Inn, the dismal showdown with Meers in the back seat of the chauffeured car, and this one from the time he spent in Sandusky (living in the Spellings’ house after his release from the hospital), which brought the notebook to a close:

  3/31/32. Walked F.’s dog tonight. A wiggly black thing named Arp, after the artist. Dada man. The street was deserted. Mist everywhere, almost impossible to see where I was. Perhaps rain as well, but drops so fine they felt like vapor. A sense of no longer being on the ground, of walking through clouds. We approached a streetlamp, and suddenly everything began to shimmer, to gleam in the murk. A world of dots, a hundred million dots of refracted light. Very strange, very beautiful: statues of illuminated fog. Arp was pulling on the leash, sniffing. We walked on, came to the end of the block, rounded the corner. Another streetlamp, and then, stopping for a moment as Arp lifted his leg, something caught my eye. A glow on the sidewalk, a burst of brightness blinking out from the shadows. It had a bluish tint to it—rich blue, the blue of F.’ s eyes. I crouched down to have a better look and saw that it was a stone, perhaps a jewel of some kind. A moonstone, I thought, or a sapphire, or maybe just a piece of cut glass. Small enough for a ring, or else a pendant that had fallen off a necklace or bracelet, a lost earring. My first thought was to give it to F.’ s niece, Dorothea, Fred’s four-year-old daughter. Little Dotty. She comes to the house often. Loves her grandma, loves to play with Arp, loves F. A charming sprite, crazy for baubles and ornaments, always dressing up in wild costumes. I said to myself: I’ll give the stone to Dotty. So I started to pick it up, but the moment my fingers came into contact with the stone, I discovered that it wasn’t what I’d thought it was. It was soft, and it broke apart when I touched it, disintegrating into a wet, slithery ooze. The thing I had taken for a stone was a gob of human spit. Someone had walked by, had emptied his mouth onto the sidewalk, and the saliva had gathered into a ball, a smooth, multifaceted sphere of bubbles. With the light shining through it, and with the reflections of the light turning it that lustrous shade of blue, it had looked like a hard and solid object. The moment I realized my mistake, my hand shot back as if I’d been burned. I felt sickened, overwhelmed by disgust. My fingers were covered in saliva. Not so bad when it’s your own, perhaps, but revolting when it comes from the mouth of a stranger. I took out my handkerchief and wiped off my fingers as best I could. When I was finished, I couldn’t bring myself to put the handkerchief back
in my pocket. Carrying it at arm’s length, I walked to the end of the street and dropped it into the first garbage can I saw.

  Three months after those words were written, Hector and Frieda were married in the living room of Mrs. Spelling’s house. They drove out to New Mexico on their honeymoon, bought some land, and decided to settle there. Now I understood why they had chosen to call their place the Blue Stone Ranch. Hector had already seen that stone, and he knew that it didn’t exist, that the life they were about to build for themselves was founded on an illusion.

  The burning ended at around six o’clock, but Alma didn’t get back to the cottage until almost seven. It was still light out, but the sun was starting to go down, and I remember how the house filled up with brightness just before she came through the door: huge shafts of light plunging through the windows, an inundation of glowing golds and purples that spread into every corner of the room. It was only my second desert sunset, and I wasn’t prepared for an attack of such radiance. I moved to the sofa, turning in the opposite direction to get the dazzle out of my eyes, but a few minutes after I settled into that new spot, I heard the latch turn in the door behind me. More light poured into the room: streams of red, liquefied sun, a tidal wave of luminosity. I wheeled around, shielding my eyes for protection, and there was Alma in the open doorway, almost invisible, a spectral outline with light shooting through the tips of her hair, a being on fire.

  Then she closed the door, and I was able to see her face, to look into her eyes as she crossed the living room and came toward the sofa. I don’t know what I was expecting from her just then. Tears, perhaps, or anger, or some excessive display of emotion, but Alma looked remarkably calm, not in turmoil anymore so much as exhausted, drained of energy. She walked around the sofa from the right, apparently unconcerned that she was showing me the birthmark on the left side of her face, and I realized that this was the first time she had done that. I wasn’t sure if I should consider it a breakthrough, however, or credit it to a lapse of attention, a symptom of fatigue. She sat down next to me without saying a word, then leaned her head against my shoulder. Her hands were dirty; her T-shirt was smudged with soot. I put both arms around her and held her for a while, not wanting to press her with questions, to force her into talking when she didn’t want to. Eventually, I asked her if she was all right, and when she answered yes, I’m all right, I understood that she had no desire to go into it. She was sorry it had taken so long, she said, but other than offering some explanations for the delay (which was how I heard about the oil drums, the hand trucks, and so on), we barely touched on the subject for the rest of the night. After it was over, she said, she had walked Frieda back to the main house. They had discussed tomorrow’s arrangements, and then she had put Frieda to bed with a sleeping pill. She would have come straight back at that point, but the phone in the cottage was on the blink (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t), and rather than take a chance with it, she had called from the phone in the main house to book a ticket for me on the morning flight to Boston. The plane would be leaving Albuquerque at eight forty-seven. It was a two-anda-half-hour drive to the airport, and because it wasn’t going to be possible for Frieda to wake up early enough to get us there in time, the only solution had been to order a van to come for me instead. She had wanted to take me there herself, to see me off in person, but she and Frieda were due at the funeral home at eleven, and how could she make two runs to Albuquerque before eleven o’clock? The math didn’t compute. Even if she left with me as early as five, she wouldn’t be able to go back and forth and back again in under seven and a half hours. How can I do what I can’t do? she said. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was a statement about herself, a declaration of misery. How the hell can I do what I can’t do? And then, turning her face in to my chest, she suddenly broke down and cried.

  I got her into the bath, and for the next half hour I sat beside her on the floor, washing her back, her arms and legs, her breasts and face and hands, her hair. It took a while before she stopped crying, but little by little the treatment seemed to produce the desired effect. Close your eyes, I said to her, don’t move, don’t say a word, just melt into the water and let yourself drift away. I was impressed by how willingly she gave in to my commands, by how unembarrassed she was by her own nakedness. It was the first time I had seen her body in the light, but Alma acted as though it already belonged to me, as though we had already passed beyond the stage where such things needed to be questioned anymore. She went limp in my arms, surrendered to the warmth of the water, surrendered unconditionally to the idea that I was the one who was taking care of her. There was no one else. She had been living alone in this cottage for the past seven years, and we both knew that it was time for her to move on. You’ll come to Vermont, I said. You’ll live there with me until you finish your book, and every day I’ll give you another bath. I’ll work on my Chateaubriand, you’ll work on your biography, and when we aren’t working, we’ll fuck. We’ll fuck in every corner of the house. We’ll hold three-day fuckfests in the backyard and the woods. We’ll fuck until we can’t stand up anymore, and then we’ll go back to work, and when our work is finished, we’ll leave Vermont and go somewhere else. Anywhere you say, Alma. I’m willing to entertain all possibilities. Nothing is out of the question.

  It was a rash thing to say under the circumstances, a supremely vulgar and outrageous proposition, but time was short, and I didn’t want to leave New Mexico without knowing where we stood. So I took a risk and decided to force the issue, presenting my case in the crudest, most graphic terms I could think of. To Alma’s credit, she didn’t flinch. Her eyes were closed when I began, and she kept them closed until the end of the speech, but at a certain point I noticed that a smile was tugging at the corners of her mouth (I believe it started when I used the word fuck for the first time), and the longer I went on talking to her, the bigger that smile seemed to become. When I was finished, however, she didn’t say anything, and her eyes remained closed. Well? I said. What do you think? What I think, she answered slowly, is that if I opened my eyes now, you might not be there.

  Yes, I said, I see what you mean. On the other hand, if you don’t open them, you’ll never know if I am or not, will you?

  I don’t think I’m brave enough.

  Of course you are. And besides, you’re forgetting that my hands are in the tub. I’m touching your spine and the small of your back. If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to do that, would I?

  Anything is possible. You could be someone else, someone who’s only pretending to be David. An impostor.

  And what would an impostor be doing with you here in this bathroom?

  Filling my head with wicked fantasies, making me believe I can have what I want. It isn’t often that someone says exactly what you want them to say. Maybe I said those words myself.

  Maybe. Or maybe someone said them because the thing he wants is the same thing you want.

  But not exactly. It’s never exactly, is it? How could he say the exact words that were in my mind?

  With his mouth. That’s where words come from. From someone’s mouth.

  Where is that mouth, then? Let me feel it. Press that mouth against mine, mister. If it feels the way it’s supposed to feel, then I’ll know it’s your mouth and not my mouth. Then maybe I’ll start to believe you.

  With her eyes still closed, Alma lifted her arms into the air, reaching up in the way small children do—asking to be hugged, asking to be carried—and I leaned over and kissed her, crushing my mouth against her mouth and parting her lips with my tongue. I was on my knees—arms in the water, hands resting on her back, elbows pinned against the side of the tub—and as Alma grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me toward her, I lost my balance and splashed down on top of her. Our heads went under the water for a moment, and when we came up again, Alma’s eyes were open. Water was sloshing over the rim of the tub, we were both gasping, and yet without pausing to take in more than a gulp of air, we repositioned our
selves and started kissing in earnest. That was the first of several kisses, the first of many kisses. I can’t account for the manipulations that followed, the complex maneuvers that enabled me to pull Alma out of the bath while keeping my lips planted on her lips, while managing not to lose contact with her tongue, but a moment came when she was out of the water and I was rubbing down her body with a towel. I remember that. I also remember that after she was dry, she peeled off my wet shirt and unbuckled the belt that was holding up my pants. I can see her doing that, and I can also see myself kissing her again, can see the two of us lowering ourselves onto a pile of towels and making love on the floor.

  It was dark in the house when we left the bathroom. A few glimmers of light in the front windows, a thin burnished cloud stretching along the horizon, residues of dusk. We put on our clothes, drank a couple of shots of tequila in the living room, and then went into the kitchen to rustle up some dinner. Frozen tacos, frozen peas, mashed potatoes—another ad hoc assemblage, making do with what there was. It didn’t matter. The food disappeared in nine minutes, and then we returned to the living room and poured ourselves another round of drinks. From that point on, Alma and I talked only about the future, and when we crawled into bed at ten o’clock, we were still making plans, still discussing what life would be like for us when she joined me on my little hill in Vermont. We didn’t know when she would be able to get there, but we figured it wouldn’t take longer than a week or two to wrap things up at the ranch, three at the outside limit. In the meantime, we would talk on the phone, and whenever it was too late or too early to call, we would send each other faxes. Come hell or high water, we said, we would be in touch every day.

  I left New Mexico without seeing Frieda again. Alma had been hoping she would walk down to the cottage to say good-bye to me, but I wasn’t expecting it. She had already crossed me off her list, and given the early hour of my departure (the van was scheduled to come at five-thirty), it seemed unlikely that she would go to the trouble of losing any sleep on my account. When she failed to show up, Alma blamed it on the pill she had taken before going to bed. That felt rather optimistic to me. According to my reading of the situation, Frieda wouldn’t have been there under any circumstances—not even if the van had left at noon.