I also told them that I intend to go on interpreting prophecies until the day I die. The thing is, everything I said at that friendly gathering could perfectly well have reached the ears of Peggy Day, because there were people there who work for the same paper. I haven’t seen her for forty years and, to tell the truth, I don’t think she’s a real astrologer at all. I met Peggy in my youth, one summer in S’Agaró. Back then, she was called Juanita Lopesbaño, and I suspect that she won’t have very fond memories of me.
You consider yourself a modest sort, and then, one day, without thinking, you start blowing your own trumpet about how good you are at interpreting newspaper horoscopes — an unthinkable mistake after so many years of discretion — and suddenly your life, most unfairly, becomes terribly complicated. Yes, life becomes incredibly complicated all because of one moment of vanity in the middle of a party.
Is it simply my remorse at having made this mistake that whipped up all this paranoia at the thought that Peggy Day knows about my blunder?
3
Stupidity isn’t my strong suit, said Monsieur Teste. I’ve always liked that line and I would repeat it over and over right now were it not for the fact that I’m hoping to write something similar, only different; saying, for example, that repetition is my strong suit. Or perhaps: repetition is my theme. Or else: I like to repeat things, but in modified form. That last phrase best suits my personality, because I’m a tireless modifier. I see, I read, I listen, and it seems to me that everything could benefit from a little editing. And I edit everything. I never stop.
My vocation is as a modifier of things.
And as a repeater of things, too. But that vocation is more commonplace. Essentially we are all repeaters. Repetition, that most human of gestures, is one I would like to analyze, research, and then I would modify the conclusions other people have reached. Do any of us come into this life to do anything that’s not the repetition of something already tried and tested by those who came before us? Basically, repetition is such a vast subject that any attempt to pin it down risks seeming ridiculous. My fear, too, is that the subject of repetition might conceal within its very nature something deeply troubling. And yet researching it is sure to have its interesting side, because repetition could be seen as something that looks to the future. Kierkegaard was referring to this attractive aspect of repetition when he said that repetition and recollection were the same movement, only in opposite directions, since “what is recollected is repeated backward, whereas repetition properly so-called is recollected forward. Therefore repetition, if it is possible, makes a man happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy. . . .”
As a modifier of things, I would now modify what Kierkegaard said, but I don’t know how. And so I’ll allow a few hours to pass and see if my modifying instinct improves. Meanwhile, I’ll record only that the afternoon is light, anodyne, provincial, elemental, perfect. I’m in an extraordinarily good mood, which is, perhaps, why I find even the anodyne nature of this afternoon so immensely pleasing. This afternoon is, in fact, no different from any other.
I’m sitting here quite still, my vigilant gaze fixed beyond my study on the spacious living room, that room where light and shade do not meet. The hours, sometimes with quite inconceivable regularity, ring out from the church clock here in the neighborhood where I’ve lived for forty years. I tell myself that, perhaps, as regards the clock, there is no repetition, just the exact same hour chiming every time: life seen as a single afternoon, as an elemental, anodyne afternoon; very occasionally glorious, but never without a grayish undertone.
I’ve always worked in the business set up by my grandfather, and which has shown me both the splendid and — in recent years — the catastrophic side of the building sector. I worked very hard in that tumultuous family business, and as a meager compensation for such crazy — truly crazy — work, in my free time I’ve been a compulsive reader, eavesdropping as much as I could — sometimes with astonishment and at others with pity — on writers from all ages, but especially contemporary writers.
When not being consumed by that demanding and, ultimately, failed business, my preferred activities were reading and intense family life. Let me be clear, I’m no stranger to misfortune. For example, when I was forty years old and had everything I could possibly want, I remember feeling utterly miserable, because my one wish was to escape from that business and, instead, return to my studies and become, say, a lawyer; but my cruel paternal grandfather (he who cannot be named) wouldn’t allow it.
I sometimes think I would love to have been like lawyer and poet Wallace Stevens. It seems to me that, as a general rule, we always want to be what we are not. I would love to have been capable of writing these lines to the editor of a literary review, as Stevens did in 1922: “Do, please, excuse me from the biographical note. I am a lawyer and live in Hartford. But such facts are neither gay nor instructive.”
I’ve always found it hard to look back, but I’m going to do so now in order to recall the very first time I heard the word “repetition.”
Cronos is a god unknown to the extremely young. Then, one day, while we are drifting, happily supine on our lake of ignorance, our first experience of repetition plunges us into time, perhaps almost as if it were a mirage.
I had my first experience of repetition when I was four years old, when, at school, someone told me that the boy I shared my desk with, little Soteras, was going to repeat his preschool year. That verb “repeat” dropped like a bomb into my young, busily expanding mind and plunged me suddenly into the circle of Time, because then I understood — it hadn’t even occurred to me before — that such things as years existed and that one school year would be followed by another school year and that we were all trapped in that nightmarish network of days, weeks, months, and “kilometers” (as a child, I thought the years were called kilometers and perhaps I wasn’t far wrong).
I entered the circle of Time in September 1952, shortly after my parents had enrolled me in a Catholic school. In the early 1950s, so-called Primary Education consisted of four stages: Preschool, Elementary, Middle Grade, and Senior Grade. You started school at four or five and could leave, en route to university, when you were sixteen or seventeen. Preschool lasted only one year and was very like a children’s playground, what, today, we call kindergarten, except that the children were all seated at desks, as if they were already expected to study seriously.
It was a time when children seemed very old, and the old seemed virtually dead. My clearest memory of that preschool year is of little Soteras’s sad face. I call him “little” because there was something about him, quite what we didn’t know, that made him appear younger than the rest of us, for, with each passing day, we seemed to become older than our years, and continued to do so at a rate of knots. The country needed us, one teacher told us, doubtless pleased to see how we were growing.
I remember Soteras would sometimes play with an inflatable ball that was, quite literally, his and which he would allow us all to play with during recess. The fact of actually owning something was the only thing that made Soteras seem older, like us. As soon as we went back to our desks, Soteras became younger again. I’ll never forget the gray cape he wore in winter, and, for a long time, I was fascinated by his status as a repeater.
I’m giving him a false name because I would prefer to treat him as a character, and also because, even though I’m not expecting anyone to read this, I cannot summon him up without imagining some possible future reader. What explanation can I give for that strange contradiction? None. But if I were obliged to find at least one, I would resort to this Hasidic saying: “The man who thinks he can live without others is mistaken; the one who thinks others can’t live without him is even more deluded.”
For many years, Soteras having to repeat the preschool year remained a great enigma to me. Then, one afternoon, when he was studying architecture and I’d abandoned my university studies to work in the family
business, we bumped into each other on the No. 7 bus on Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona, and I couldn’t resist asking him, straight out, why he had repeated the year that no one ever repeats, namely, the preschool year.
Not only was Soteras entirely unsurprised by my question, he looked at me and smiled, and seemed really glad to be able to answer it, as if he had spent years preparing himself for that day.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, “but I asked my parents to let me stay down a year because I was afraid of moving up to the next one.”
I did believe him, because I found that perfectly plausible. And it seemed even more plausible when he added that he had seen what the next year was like and realized how hard pupils had to study, and that it appeared to be an environment deliberately created to be cold. In those days, I thought to myself, we were afraid of change, afraid of studying, afraid of the coldness of life, afraid of everything; there was an awful lot of fear around then. And I was still thinking this when Soteras asked if I’d ever heard of someone going to see a movie twice, and entirely failing to understand it the second time around. I stood rooted to the spot, dumbstruck, in the middle of that crowded bus.
“Well,” he said, “that’s what happened to me after spending two years in preschool: the first time I understood everything, the second time nothing at all.”
[Whoroscope 3]
“Problems with the kids in the morning. In the afternoon, you will discover that the world is so perfect that it lacks for nothing.”
This time, Peggy wasn’t addressing me directly; presumably having done so yesterday was enough. However, as usual, this didn’t stop me from giving her oracle a personal interpretation. She seems to be warning me not to continue writing, not to add anything to the world, because I would simply be repeating and repeating. Or are there things that have yet to be written? As for those “problems with the kids,” they surely didn’t apply to my three children, who are all grown up now and leading their own lives, but, rather, to the complicated technical difficulties I’ve had to resolve this morning while writing. The children she mentions are the paragraphs that have caused me so many problems and anxieties.
As for that “In the afternoon, you will discover” business, this clearly refers to what I learned a couple of hours ago from Ander Sánchez and what he said to Ana Turner and me when I went out to buy some cigarettes and met him outside the bookstore, enjoying a laugh with Ana. Our famous neighbor Sánchez, the “celebrated Barcelona writer,” greeted me with unusual warmth. He rarely does so, but then, we weren’t both hurrying off down the street, as has tended to be the case whenever we’ve met over the years. Instead, he was standing outside the bookstore, an easy target for anyone wishing to assail him with a few admiring or merely courteous words. There he was, making no attempt to conceal the fact that he was in thrall to the charms of the marvelous Ana, something that made me feel unexpectedly jealous.
Who doesn’t know Sánchez in an area that, in part, owes its name — Coyote — to his existence, because, by the most coincidental of coincidences, the apartment where Sánchez has lived for some decades — in the building next to mine — once belonged to José Mallorquí, the most popular Barcelona writer of the 1940s. Or it might be that Sánchez bought it unaware that Mallorquí had been its former occupant; however, word on the street is that he bought it precisely because he thought it might help him to become, like that former occupant, the most widely sold author in Spain. For, from 1943 on, in what is now Sánchez’s apartment, José Mallorquí wrote the two hundred novels in the series El Coyote, pulp novels that were huge bestsellers in postwar Spain.
When I came to live in this neighborhood all those years ago, this part of the Eixample had no name, then we and some other neighbors, half-joking, decided to call it the Coyote district. The name caught on, and now almost everyone calls it that, although in the vast majority of cases, they have no idea where the name comes from. It’s a neighborhood that extends, with no very definite borders, as far as Plaza de Francesc Macià, formerly called Calvo Sotelo, and before that, during the civil war, Plaza Hermanos Badía.
Anyway, today, Sánchez — who has no idea that I was among those who participated in the naming of this neighborhood — deigned to say hello to me. More than that, he spoke to me with such exquisite, elaborate politeness that I was obliged, unaccustomed as I am, to reciprocate in rather clumsy fashion.
And in the middle of all this, he began — more, I thought, in order to impress Ana than anything else — to talk brilliantly about all kinds of things, and, without the least encouragement from either of us, he ended up revealing the difficulties he had in recalling the years of his youth, and one year in particular, when he had doubtless drunk even more than usual, he said, because he wrote a novel about a ventriloquist and a sunshade from Java (which concealed a deadly weapon) and about a miserable barber from Seville.
“But I can’t remember much more than that,” he said, “except that it contained a few passages that were completely incomprehensible, or, rather, opaque, dense, how can I put it, verging on the deeply stupid. . . .”
He was clearly very good at laughing at himself. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should attempt to follow his lead, although if I were to try out my self-ridicule on Ana, I’d do such a bad job of it that I’d just end up making a complete fool of myself.
What most intrigued Sánchez, he said, was how he could have written a book full of such utter nonsense. He was probably talking about the novel from his early period, Walter’s Problem. He was amazed he’d managed to write the book at all, given that he was permanently drunk at the time, and even more amazed that the novel was blithely accepted by his publisher, who published it without a murmur, perhaps because he was paying Sánchez so little and so couldn’t really afford to be too demanding.
It was, he said, a book full of inconsistencies and mistakes, the occasional absurd change in pace, and all kinds of twaddle, although — and here he chose to brag — it did also contain the occasional brilliant idea, which, oddly enough, sprang directly out of all the other nonsense. He could only partially remember the novel, his memory being somewhat watered down, as if he could only remember the tonic from the G&Ts that he drank incessantly while writing his ventriloquist’s deliberately partial memoirs.
Having told us this whole saga, he suddenly fell silent. Ana seemed more and more captivated by him, and this so irritated me that I had to remind myself that, according to recent statements straight from the horse’s mouth, Sánchez was currently planning a total of four autobiographical novels in the style of the Norwegian writer Knausgaard. And I screamed under my breath:
“You cannot be serious!”
The other two looked at me uncomprehendingly, but, at the same time, entirely unfazed by their failure to comprehend, which only confirmed that I was completely incidental to the goings-on there. I thought about Walter’s Problem, because it was a book not entirely unfamiliar to me. I remembered that it was strangely beautiful in places, and, in others, uneven and quite deranged, and I was pretty sure that I hadn’t actually read it to the end. Yes, I remember now, I abandoned it about halfway through, having begun to grow bored with the inclusion in every story or chapter of one or two paragraphs that had nothing to do with anything else; unbearable paragraphs, which, if I’m not mistaken, Sánchez had justified later on, in interviews after the book came out, saying that he had deliberately made them confusing “because the plot demanded it.”
Because the plot demanded it! It was hardly the most cast-iron of plots. The book was supposedly the memoirs of a ventriloquist, but that plot or lifeline consisted — again if I remember rightly — of a few “biographical sketches.” It resembled a life of which we were given only the bare bones: a few significant moments, alongside other more tangential episodes, and still others that had barely any connection with Walter’s world at all, as if they were part of someone else’s memoirs.
“I was very young when I wrote it,” he said, “and I think now that it was a misuse of my talent. Actually, I really regret having let that novel get away. It was sheer stupidity on my part. But what can you do? You can’t turn back the clock. Luckily for me, no one remembers it now.”
He bowed his head for a moment, then glanced up again to say:
“There are days when I even wonder if someone else wrote it for me.”
And he seemed about to look at me.
Oh hell, I thought with a shudder, I hope he doesn’t think I wrote it.
4
I spent the morning half asleep, just as a certain poor beginner was at last discovering what it was he wanted to write about and had embarked on an investigation into repetition, which was, without a doubt, the subject to which his first three days of writing exercises had led him. Hadn’t this debutant predicted that it was the writing process itself that would help him discover what it was he wanted to say?
What’s more, a voice was saying: “Repetition is my strong suit.”
Anyway. On realizing, still half asleep, that this poor beginner might in fact be me, I had even more of a ridiculous shock than Stan Laurel gets in the scene where a thief slips his hand over the back of the bench where he is napping, and Stan, in his sleepy reverie, with his own hands clasped together, mistakes the stranger’s hand for one of his.
A little later, as I sat pondering the theme of repetition, it occurred to me that, even supposing that you triumph in your first battle as a writer and produce something amazing — they say it’s rare to carve out such a path, to find your voice — such a victory can end up being something of a problem, containing, as it does, the seed that sooner or later will inevitably lead the author to repeat himself. Which isn’t to say that this rare victory — finding the unique tone or register — isn’t still highly desirable, for no one can deny the gulf that exists between the writer who has found his own voice and the bleating literary chorus from the mass grave of the talentless, even if, ultimately, at the end of the long road, there is but one icy plain for all of us.
Mac's Problem Page 2
