While she was injecting him, I studied her face. I once read somewhere that the beauty of a face isn’t part of a particular cultural canon but a concept shared by all ethnic groups. Apparently, the same face would look attractive to the vast majority of human beings. Experiments have been run in nurseries, showing that babies have different reactions depending on the facial features of the staff member. They tend to cry when they see an unattractive face, while they are soothed by and will smile at one with regular features.
When she finished her work, Meritxell gave me another smile. That of course didn’t mean she was going to accept an invitation to hot chocolate and ladyfingers. I opted for discretion and left without saying a word.
I saw a fleeting expression of disappointment on her face. No doubt she would have said no, but probably she would have loved me to ask her. I’ve never dared to probe too deep into the mysteries of female coquetry.
Seeking and Finding
Since I had the rest of the morning free, I thought I’d pay Titus a visit in the hospital.
During my Metro journey, I took the opportunity to read a few of Buddha’s aphorisms, which could be used for the book. I felt a bit embarrassed pulling out the anthology I’d found in Titus’s apartment. That car full of gray faces didn’t seem to be the best place for contemplative reading. Soon, however, I realized that no one was paying attention to what I or anyone else was doing. All the passengers looked on without seeing, with their eyes open—which is worse than them having their eyes closed. In that case, they could dream.
This reminded me of a passage I’d particularly liked from Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. In it, Pessoa says, more or less, that when we’re asleep we all become children again because, as we slumber, we can do no wrong and are unaware of life. By some kind of natural magic, the greatest criminal and the most callous egotist become holy during their sleep. Therefore, according to the poet, there is hardly any difference between killing a sleeping man and a child.
From saudade—another untranslatable term—in Portuguese, I jumped to the words attributed to Siddhartha Gautama:
Pain is inevitable
but suffering is optional.
He who doesn’t know what to attend to
and what not to heed
attends to the unimportant
and ignores the essential.
That’s me. I got off at the Hospital Clínic stop, almost angry that someone who lived twenty-five hundred years ago should be giving me advice.
—
“How are your two missions going?” Titus asked.
“I’ve finished the contents page for the book. What’s the other mission?”
“Finding Gabriela, of course.”
“So far I’ve drawn a blank in my search.”
“I didn’t tell you to search for her, but to find her,” Titus pointed out.
“I don’t see the difference.”
“While you’re looking, your eyes can go no further than the limits of your expectations. It would be like me looking for God under the bed because, in my position, that’s the most comfortable thing. Do you understand?”
I nodded, thinking again about the drunk man looking for his keys next to the lamppost.
“So,” Titus added, “when you’re looking, you never find anything really important.”
“What am I supposed to do, then? Hang around with my arms crossed?”
“On the contrary,” Titus said, sitting up in his bed.
“In order to find something,” he went on, clutching my hand, “you’ve got to let yourself go. If you follow preconceived ideas, you won’t even see what’s happening in front of your nose.”
I nodded again and noticed that the other bed was empty.
“What happened to your roommate?” I asked. “Where’s he gone?”
“If I knew,” Titus said with a sad smile, “they’d give me the Nobel Prize for Everything.”
“The difficult I’ll do right now /
The impossible will take a little while”
The assignment on Kafka’s The Castle was revealing, if only because it demonstrated that the students had not understood a thing about it.
This has always been my favorite novel by Kafka, maybe because it’s the most enigmatic. Since he died when it was only half finished, one can only guess what would have happened in the end to the land surveyor K., who is constantly thwarted in his attempts to reach the castle.
Was Gabriela my personal castle? Worried by this association, I brushed up on the basic plot on my way to the bar with the terrace.
The land surveyor K. is wandering around, confused by a series of contradictory signs:
K. arrives in a snowbound town, where he’s been summoned by the castle owners.
Once he has found shelter at the inn, a telephone call informs him that he will never be able to go to the castle.
Shortly afterward, he receives a letter confirming that he has been employed in the service of the lords of the castle.
The mayor informs K. that the castle has no need for land surveyors and an administrative error is the cause of the confusion.
The very same day a letter tells him that the inhabitants of the castle are very satisfied with his surveying work.
Although he receives this message, K. is still unable to do his work, and all his attempts to reach the castle fail.
The castle is an emblem of all the most absurd human aspirations—such as the desire for immortality or my efforts to rekindle an old love from thirty years ago. This thought took me back to Titus once more. He’d told me that if I went looking for Gabriela I wouldn’t find her, but I wanted to try again, one last time.
I decided that if the madman was sitting on the terrace I’d walk past and never go back. All the tables were free, as it was a cold, windy day, so I sat down at the one in the middle and, once again, asked for a vermouth. I rubbed my hands, trying to get some warmth into them, realizing as I did so that I seemed to be irresistibly attracted to the terrace, like the moon to the earth. I was a ridiculous satellite spinning around an impossible dream.
I studied the to-ing and fro-ing of all the passersby going in both directions. If Gabriela was there among all those people, it would have been like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack, but still I wanted to give it one final chance.
I was humming to the music drifting out of the bar—Billie Holiday crooning “The difficult I’ll do right now / The impossible will take a little while”—when a sinister figure loomed before me so fast I had no time to react. The bearded man sank into the metal chair and placed his manuscript on the table.
I could have finished my vermouth and left. Yet I felt inexplicably rooted to my seat. Feeling strangely calm, I kept watching the passersby.
Something’s going to happen today.
There was no reason for thinking this, but an arrow had pierced the layers of my unconscious to tell me. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t too startled when the man in the hat asked, “Do you feel nostalgia for the future?”
A Successful Failure
I studied the man’s round face—his beard, his mustache, his protruding lower lip.
“I can’t feel nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened,” I said.
“Can’t you?” he replied, pulling his chair closer to mine, without leaving his table. “We all know more or less what’s going to happen, because to a great extent we choose our futures. This is a trick used by good soothsayers.”
“What do you mean?”
“Reading the future is like playing chess. An average player can predict the next two or three moves on the board. A good player, many more. It’s a question of logic and coherence.”
“And you’ve been able to see where your game’s heading?”
“Yes. Before the checkmate there are some great adventures. That’s why
I’m nostalgic for the future. It will be wonderful, and I’d like to be there already.”
“Well, since it depends on you,” I said, humoring him, “can’t you bring the game forward?”
“That’s impossible. You have to go through lots of things before that, you understand? In chess, some moves lead to the next ones. If you interfere with the game, nothing will happen at all.”
“Let me guess, then. The future for which you feel nostalgia is written in this manuscript you’re always carrying around with you.”
“You’re a clever boy,” he said with a grimace. “Perhaps you can help me with something.”
“Uh-oh. Houston, we have a problem,” I said with a laugh.
“April 11th, 1970.”
“What?”
“The date when they launched Apollo 13. A bad number. It almost cost them their lives.”
“I see you’re superstitious.”
“You have to be when the signs are so clear. Apollo 13 was launched at 13:13 on a date whose numbers add up to thirteen. Try it: 4/11/70.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“It was a miracle they made it back to earth. That’s why NASA called the mission a ‘successful failure.’ Beautiful definition, don’t you think?” He gave me a conspiratorial glance and drained his coffee.
“So what’s today’s move, then?” I said.
“To discover who wrote a piece of music I like a lot. Do you know anything about music?”
“A fair bit,” I confessed.
“Good,” he said, brightening up. “Then perhaps you can help me. I was watching a film yesterday on TV. It was about two vampires locked in an apartment in New York.”
“Were the vampires Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie?”
“I think so. Sometimes you could hear some very sad music played on the piano. I’d like to know who wrote it. I couldn’t see it in the credits.”
“I think it’s a piece by Ravel—‘Le Gibet,’ or something like that. The gibbet. Not a very cheerful title.”
“Indeed. But thanks for the information.”
He stood up, left a coin on the table, and tipped his hat.
“Valdemar’s leaving.”
And he headed off in the direction he’d come from, with his manuscript under his arm.
Venetian Boat Song
I finished my vermouth and sat there pensively until the freezing wind persuaded me to leave.
Ravel’s languid chords were echoing in my head, and I now wanted to hear the piece again. I checked my watch. If I hurried I could get to the music shop before it closed.
This was a small establishment in Carrer Tallers specializing in classical music. I hadn’t been there for over a month. If there was anywhere one could find a recording of Ravel’s “Le Gibet,” this was the place.
I recklessly dashed across Carrer Pelai, took a shortcut down Carrer Jovellanos, and reached the shop five minutes before it closed for lunch. I walked past the drowsy cashier and was greeted by a delightful melody. I hadn’t heard it for ages. It was one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words titled “Venetian Boat Song,” a piece for the piano, like Ravel’s, but full of lyricism.
I decided to leave “Le Gibet” for the time being and went automatically from the Contemporary Music section to the Romantics. Before looking for the recording I intended to take home with me, I closed my eyes and waited for the last notes of “Venetian Boat Song” to fade out. When I opened my eyes, my heart began to thump so hard I nearly fainted. There, on the other side of the display, was Gabriela.
Although we were only a few inches apart—I could even smell the fragrance of her long wavy hair—she hadn’t seen me. She was blinking as she was looking for something on one of the shelves.
Fighting off the panic attack that was pushing me to run away, I held my breath, waiting for Gabriela to look up.
When she did, my heart began pounding like a war drum. I had a few instants to admire the constellation of freckles on her cheeks before she shot me an inquisitive glance.
My first move was not the most imaginative.
“Hello.”
A look of perplexity passed across her face. That was hardly surprising. I, too, felt as if I was in a daze, and I’d just broken the ice in the clumsiest way.
“Do you remember me?”
She stared at me with her almond-shaped eyes and said, “No. What do you want?”
I was so thrown by her response that I hesitated before I continued. If the whole thing was just an illusion and I’d recognized her but she didn’t remember me, I’d be making a complete fool of myself. Yet I forged ahead. “I think we used to play hide-and-seek together many years ago in a neoclassical mansion on the right side of La Rambla and—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She seemed alarmed. “You must have the wrong person.”
With that, she turned around and took refuge in another part of the shop.
Blushing with shame, I left the shop with no music apart from the jangling fragments of my broken heart.
A Magic Lantern
Trying to find something to distract me, I began to mull over what I now considered to have been the weirdest afternoon of my life. After The Castle and my chat with Valdemar, I’d chanced upon Gabriela, who hadn’t even recognized me.
Why, then, had she shot me such a knowing glance at the traffic light? Not only that, she’d turned around to give me one last look before continuing on her way. Or had the whole thing been nothing more than a fever-induced hallucination?
On my way home, I replayed the scene in the music shop in my mind. I finally came up with the only logical explanation. Our eyes had just happened to meet when we were crossing the road, and she’d turned around by chance. We all turn around sometimes when we’re walking on the street.
Without a doubt, she was the same person who’d roused my passions thirty years earlier with a butterfly kiss. The problem was that she did not remember it. Maybe this scene from our childhood had meant nothing to Gabriela—not then and certainly not now.
For the first time I accepted the painful fact that I was not a memorable man. The worst, most absurd thing was that I was hopelessly in love with her.
—
When I got home I almost rushed out again to the hospital to tell Titus what had happened. Don’t they say that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved?
I decided against it. I had accepted defeat and didn’t want to rub salt into my own wounds. In order to alleviate my sorrows I’d do the only thing I knew how to do: work. As I went upstairs laden with books, I was glad that I had this extra task to keep me busy.
After my obligatory pause in front of the Wanderer, I sat down at Titus’s desk ready to get on with the job.
I’d pasted the titles from the contents page on separate pages of the document with the intention of filling up each section with whatever ideas occurred to me. I glanced at the final section, “Love in Lowercase,” and added another detonator of universal love.
No. 2: Talk to a Stranger
I had to include this because my conversation with Valdemar had taken me to the topic of Ravel, which led me to the music shop. There, the “Venetian Boat Song” had carried me away, along mysterious canals, to Gabriela. But what good had it done me?
I briefly abandoned this section in order to work on “Heart in the Hand.” While rereading Werther before one of my classes, I’d come across a passage in which Werther offers his friend some moving thoughts on the mysteries of love. He’d included an anecdote. Full of self-pity, I began to copy it out:
Wilhelm, what is the world to our hearts without love? What is a magic lantern without light? You have only to kindle the flame within, and the brightest figures will shine on the white wall; and, if love only shows us fleeting shadows, we are yet happy when, like mere children, we behold
them and are transported with the splendid phantoms. I have not been able to see Charlotte today. I was prevented by a social occasion from which I could not disengage myself. What was to be done? I sent my servant to her house, that I might at least see somebody today who had been near her. Oh, the impatience with which I waited for his return! The joy with which I welcomed him! I should certainly have caught him in my arms and kissed him, if I had not been ashamed.
It is said that the Bonona stone, when placed in the sun, attracts its rays and for a time appears to glow in the dark. So it was with me and this servant. The idea that Charlotte’s eyes had dwelt on his countenance, his cheek, his very apparel, endeared them all inestimably to me, so that at the moment I would not have parted from him for a thousand crowns. His presence made me so happy! Do not laugh at me, Wilhelm. Can that which makes us happy be a delusion?
III
The Pathos of Things
The Gondolier Again
A week after that strange, sad afternoon, there was another sign. I was free that morning, so I set about some housework and tuned in to the classical-music station on the radio.
I was washing a pile of food-encrusted plates when the announcer mentioned Songs without Words. I turned off the tap and turned up the volume, waiting to discover some hidden message.
“ . . . In 1828, the composer gave his favorite sister Fanny a birthday present, a piece he called ‘Song without Words.’ Mendelssohn was nineteen years old at the time. Throughout his career he kept adding more short piano pieces to it. The first collection of Songs without Words was published in 1832. It was very successful among the middle classes of the period, since they were starting to install pianos in their living rooms and these short works were very much to their taste. Although the piano pieces were untitled, Mendelssohn’s Victorian admirers, convinced that the musical miniatures had some kind of storyline, began to give some of them pretentious names such as ‘Lost Happiness,’ and others nonsensical ones such as ‘The Bee’s Wedding.’ Mendelssohn himself contributed to this by naming some of his Songs without Words—for example, such well-known pieces as ‘Venetian Boat Song,’ which we shall now listen to.”
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