Mac’s Problem
ALSO BY ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS
from New Directions
Bartleby & Co.
Because She Never Asked
A Brief History of Portable Literature
Dublinesque
The Illogic of Kassel
Montano’s Malady
Never Any End to Paris
Vampire in Love
Copyright © 2017 by Enrique Vila-Matas
Translation copyright © 2019 by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
This edition is published by arrangement with Enrique Vila-Matas c/o MB Agencia Literaria S.L.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published in 2019 as New Directions Paperbook 1444
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vila-Matas, Enrique, 1948– author. | Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. |
Hughes, Sophie (Sophie Elizabeth), 1986– translator.
Title: Mac’s problem : a novel / Enrique Vila-Matas ; translated from the Spanish
by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes.
Other titles: Mac y su contratiempo. English
Description: New York : New Directions Books, 2019
Identifiers: LCCN 2018047704 (print) | LCCN 2018048345 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780811227322 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780811227339 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ6672.I37 M3313 2019 (print) | LCC PQ6672.I37 (ebook) |
DDC 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047704
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
For Paula de Parma
I remember that I almost always went dressed as a hobo or a ghost.
Once I went as a skeleton.
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Mac’s Problem
1
I’m fascinated by the current vogue for posthumous books, and I’m thinking of writing a fake one that could appear to be “posthumous” and “unfinished” when it would, in fact, be perfectly complete. Were I to die during the writing process, the book really would be my “final, interrupted work,” and that would, among other things, ruin my great dream of becoming a falsifier. Then again, a beginner must be prepared for anything, and I am just that, a debutant. My name is Mac. Perhaps because I am only a beginner, the best and most sensible thing would be to wait a while before attempting anything as challenging as a fake “posthumous” book. Given my status as a writing novice, my priority will be not to launch straight into that “last” book or to create some other kind of fake, but simply to put pen to paper every day and see what happens. And then there might come a time when, feeling more prepared, I decide to make a stab at that book falsely interrupted by my death, disappearance, or suicide. For the moment, I will content myself with writing this diary, which I am starting today, feeling utterly terrified, not even daring to look in the mirror for fear of catching sight of my head hunched down inside my shirt collar.
As I said, my name is Mac. I live here in the Coyote district. I’m sitting in my usual room, as if I’d been sitting here forever. I’m listening to Kate Bush, and Bowie’s lined up next. Outside, the summer looks set to do its worst, and Barcelona is preparing — so the weathermen say — for a sharp rise in temperatures.
I’m called Mac after a famous scene in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. My parents saw the movie shortly before I was born and particularly liked the part when Sheriff Wyatt asks the old barman in the saloon:
“Mac, you ever been in love?”
“No, I been a bartender all my life.”
They loved the bartender’s response and ever since then, since the day in April in the late 1940s when I was born, I’ve been Mac.
Mac here, there, and everywhere. I’m Mac to everyone. In recent years, on more than one occasion, I’ve been mistaken for a Macintosh computer. And that always tickles me, perhaps because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s far better to be known as Mac than by my real name, which is just awful, a tyrannical imposition by my paternal grandfather, and I refuse even to pronounce it, still less write it.
Everything I say in this diary I’ll be saying to myself, because no one else is going to read it. I withdraw to this private space where, among other things, I’m trying to ascertain if — as Nathalie Sarraute once said — writing really is an attempt to find out what we would write if we wrote. This is a secret diary of initiation, which doesn’t even know yet if it’s showing signs of having been started. I, on the other hand, text certainly have started giving out signals that, at the age of sixty-plus, I’m embarking on a new path. I’ve waited too long for this moment to arrive to throw it all away now. The time is nigh, if it isn’t already upon me.
“Mac, Mac, Mac.”
Who’s speaking?
It’s the voice of a dead man who appears to be lodged inside my head. I assume he’s trying to advise me not to rush things, but that’s no reason to rein in my hopes and aspirations. That voice isn’t going to frighten me, and so I’ll proceed exactly as I intended to. Does the voice not realize that for two months and seven days, ever since the family construction business went bust, I’ve felt both demoralized and immensely liberated, as if the closure of all our offices and the abrupt suspension of payments has helped me find my place in the world?
I have my own reasons for feeling better than when I earned my living as a prosperous builder. However, that newfound happiness — yes, let’s call it that — isn’t exactly something I’m aching for other people to notice. I dislike all forms of ostentation. I’ve always felt a need to be as inconspicuous as possible, which is the origin of my tendency, whenever possible, to hide.
Lying low, hunkering down with these pages will keep me entertained; although I would just say that, if, for some reason, I should be discovered, that wouldn’t be a catastrophe either. In the meantime, I prefer for this diary to remain secret, which gives me greater freedom to say what I like, to say now, for example, that you can spend years and years believing yourself to be a writer, safe in the knowledge that no one’s going to bother telling you: “Quit kidding yourself, you’re not.” Now, if, one day, that same would-be writer decides to make his debut, to knuckle down and finally put pen to paper, that bold beginner will immediately notice, if he’s honest with himself, that this activity has nothing to do with the vulgar idea of believing himself to be a writer, because — and I want to say this now with no more beating about the bush — in order to write one must cease to be a writer.
Although in the next few days I’ll agree to accept the paltry sum from the sale of the apartment that, up until now, I’ve managed to hang on to after my economic ruin, I worry about ending up entirely dependent on Carmen’s business. Or worse, having to ask for help from my children. Who would have thought that one day I would be at the mercy of my wife’s furniture restoration workshop, when only a few short weeks ago, I was the owner of a rock-solid construction company? It worries me having to depend on Carmen, but even if I lost everything, I don’t think I would be any worse off than when I was building houses, lining my pockets with gold, but also plagued with all manner of frustrations and neuros
es.
Although life’s mundane affairs have led me down unanticipated paths, and although I’ve never written anything of a literary nature before, I’ve always been passionate about reading and an aficionado of brevity. First it was poetry, then it was short stories. I love short stories. I don’t, on the other hand, have much sympathy for novels, because they are, as Barthes said, a form of death, transforming life into Fate. If I were to write a novel, I’d like to lose it the way you might mislay an apple after buying a whole bagful from the local Pakistani convenience store. I’d like to lose it just to prove that I don’t care one bit about novels and prefer other literary forms. I was deeply impressed by a very short story by Ana María Matute, in which she said that the story has an old vagabond heart that wanders into town, then disappears. . . . Matute concludes: “The story withdraws, but leaves its mark.” I sometimes tell myself that I was saved from a great misfortune when, from a very early age, everything conspired to leave me without even a moment to discover that to write is to cease to write. If I’d had the necessary free time, I might now be oozing literary talent, or else be quite simply destroyed and finished as a writer, but in either case entirely unable to enjoy the marvelous beginnerish spirit I’m relishing at this precise moment, this perfect moment, on the dot of noon on the morning of June 29, just as I’m preparing to crack open a bottle of 1966 Vega Sicilia, experiencing, let’s say, the joy of someone who knows he’s still unpublished and is celebrating the start of this apprentice’s diary, this secret diary, and looking around him in the silence of the morning, aware of a faintly luminous air, which may exist only inside his brain.
[Whoroscope]
At the point when one can begin to call evening night, and when I was already slightly tipsy, I decided to dig out a 1970 Spanish edition of Poems by Samuel Beckett. The first section of the book is entitled Whoroscope. It’s a meditation on time and was written and published in 1930. I understood it less than when I first read it, but, for whatever reason, perhaps precisely because I understood less, I liked it much more. Those hundred lines by Beckett on the passing of the days, dissipation, and hen’s eggs sound distinctly Cartesian, or like Descartes’s ventriloquized voice. The thing I least understood was that business about chickens and their eggs, but, boy, did I have fun not understanding it. Perfect.
&
I wonder why it is that today, knowing myself to be a mere novice, I worked my fingers to the bone trying in vain to begin this diary with a few impeccable opening paragraphs. The hours I spent on this absurd enterprise! To say that I have plenty of time and nothing else to do is no excuse. The fact is that I wrote everything in pencil on pages torn from my notebook, then went through it with a fine-tooth comb, typed it on my computer, printed it out, reread it, studied the corrected version, and edited it some more — which is when a writer really writes — then, after transferring this back onto my PC, I erased all trace of what I’d written by hand and gave final approval to my notes of the day, which have remained buried inside my computer’s enigmatic innards.
I realize now that I behaved as if I didn’t know that — ultimately — perfect paragraphs don’t stand the test of time, because they are mere language, and can be destroyed by a sloppy typesetter, by changes in fashions and usage, in short, by life itself.
But, says the voice, since you’re only a beginner, the gods of writing can still forgive you your mistakes.
2
Yesterday, the cheerful, fanatical lifelong reader in me looked down at my desk, at the small rectangle of wood positioned in one corner of my study, and made his writing debut.
I began my diary exercises without a plan, aware that in literature you don’t start because you have something to write about and then write it. It’s the writing process itself that allows the author to discover what it is he wants to say. That’s how I began yesterday, with the intention of maintaining a readiness to learn slowly and steadily and perhaps, one day, achieve a depth of knowledge that might allow me to take on far greater challenges. That’s how I began yesterday, and that’s how I mean to go on, just being carried along and finding out as I go where my words will lead me.
Seeing myself, so modest and insignificant, seated at the small wooden structure that Carmen built for me years ago in her workshop — not for me to write at, but so that I could work on my thriving business from home — has made me think about how certain minor and even basic characters in books stay with you longer than other more spectacular heroes. I’m thinking of drab, unassuming Akaky Akakievich, Gogol’s copyist in “The Overcoat,” a bureaucrat destined to be — to put it plainly — an “insignificant fellow.” Akakievich only appears in this one brief tale, but he is undoubtedly one of the most vivid and convincing characters in the history of world literature, perhaps because, in this short work, Gogol threw common sense to the wind and worked away gaily on the edge of his own private abyss.
I’ve always been fond of Akaky Akakievich, who needs a new overcoat to protect himself from the St. Petersburg winter, but, on acquiring one, notices that the cold persists — an unending, universal cold. It hasn’t escaped me that Akakievich the copyist was brought into the world by Gogol in 1842, which leads me to believe that he has his direct descendants in all those characters who crop up in the literature of the day, the creatures we see painstakingly copying things out in schools and offices, transcribing documents around the clock under the dim light of an oil lamp; they copy texts mechanically and appear capable of repeating everything that’s still to be repeated in the world, without ever expressing any personal opinions, or making attempts to modify anything. “I don’t do change,” I think I recall one of those characters saying. “I don’t want any changes,” said another.
Another person who doesn’t want any changes is “the repeater” (better known at school as “34”), a character from one of the stories in My Documents by Alejandro Zambra. 34 has repeater syndrome. He’s a specialist in repeating the school year, without this constituting, for him, any kind of setback. Quite the opposite. Zambra’s repeater is strangely unresentful; he’s a perfectly laid-back young man: “Sometimes we’d see him talking to teachers we didn’t know. They were animated conversations. . . . He liked to remain on friendly terms with the teachers who had failed him.”
The last time I saw Ana Turner — one of the booksellers at La Súbita, the only bookstore in the Coyote neighborhood, and a very happy one, too — she told me that she’d sent an email to her friend Zambra asking him about 34 and received this reply: “It seems to me that we poets and storytellers are the real repeaters. The poet is a repeater. Those who needed to write only one book — some not even that — in order to pass the year aren’t like the rest of us, who are obliged to keep on trying.”
To me, Ana Turner is a constant source of surprise and admiration: I have no idea how, working at La Súbita, she managed to contact a writer like Zambra. Equally intriguing is how she manages to grow more attractive by the day. Every time I see her I’m bowled over. I try to play it cool, but there’s always some new — not necessarily physical — detail about Ana that I wasn’t expecting. The afternoon when I last saw her I discovered, thanks to Zambra’s words — “it seems to me that we poets and storytellers are the real repeaters” — that Ana was quite possibly a poet. I do write poems, she confessed rather diffidently. But really they’re just attempts, she added. And her words seemed to echo Zambra, saying that writers are “obliged to keep on trying.”
Hearing this from the mouth of someone like Ana, I first thought how lovely life can be, but then my mind flitted to other, darker thoughts, like the back row in a school classroom, and the students condemned to write two hundred lines, all in the name of improving their handwriting.
I also thought about a novelist who was once asked by a lady at a conference when he was going to stop writing about people who murdered women. He replied:
“I assure you that as soon as I get it right, I’l
l stop.”
At several points this morning, as I recalled those repeaters-cum-calligraphers about whom I’m now writing, I had the feeling that I was glimpsing the dark parasite of repetition that lies at the core of all literary creation. A parasite in the form of the solitary gray droplet that exists in the midst of every rain shower or storm and also at the very center of the universe, where, as we know, the same routines, always the same, are repeated over and over, because everything there gets ceaselessly, crushingly repeated.
[Whoroscope 2]
A little early-evening prose. I’ve had my three customary afternoon nips and consulted the horoscope in my favorite newspaper. I was astonished when I read this in the box for my sign: “For Aries, the Sun in conjunction with Mercury suggests brilliant intuitions that will lead you to believe this prediction and think it’s meant especially for you.”
Whoroscope! This time the prediction really did seem to be meant especially for me, as if Peggy Day — the pseudonym of the lady responsible for the horoscope — had somehow gotten wind of my mistake last week when, in front of more people than I’d care to remember, I mentioned that, at the end of each day, I like to read the horoscope in my favorite newspaper and that, even when the prediction has no relevance to my life at all, in the end, my experience as a seasoned reader leads me to interpret the text so that whatever it says seems to fit perfectly with whatever has happened to me that day.
You just have to know how to read, I said on that occasion, and I even spoke to them about the seers and sibyls of old and how their ravings would be interpreted by one of the many priests with which antiquity was teeming at the time. For the true art of those sibyls lay in those interpretations. I even spoke to them about Lídia, that native of Cadaqués, who, according to Dalí, possessed the most magnificently paranoid mind he’d ever known. In 1904, Lídia briefly saw Eugeni d’Ors and was so struck by him that, ten years later, in the local social club, she would interpret the articles that d’Ors published in a Barcelona newspaper as responses to the letters she sent him and to which he never replied.
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