Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  In some ways, writing that email has left me more at the mercy of her projections than ever, and, of course, it’s quite possible that I am turning into a kind of Lídia of Cadaqués, crazily interpreting Peggy’s oracles as a daily response to the email I now wish I’d never sent.

  I enjoy doing this, although, in the end, I always leave the party with an uneasy feeling in my stomach. A moment ago, I looked out of the window onto the street and, in my imagination, I observed the movements of the small handful of people who pass by our house at ten at night. I should think Carmen is now more than used to seeing me standing by the window at this hour, and to assuming that my visual sweeps of the outside world are one more consequence of the idleness and lack of direction to which she thinks I’ve become prey since I strayed from the speciously solid business path.

  It’s really quite unfair that she should think this. Gazing out of the window once too often makes me disoriented, does it? Fine, but it can happen to anyone. My mind might wander from time to time, at moments when I’m not sure what to do, but that’s all. Besides, at other times of the day I couldn’t be busier. Just a second ago, for instance, I couldn’t have been busier as, standing at my window, I imagined bumping into Sánchez down on the street and asking him about the second story (or chapter) of his novel, “The Duel of Grimaces,” and certain aspects of it that had intrigued me.

  Before setting off for my sister’s house, I spent this morning reading “The Duel of Grimaces,” and saw that it really does have a Djuna Barnes feel to it. Barnes is barely read these days, but she was fashionable in Spain in the mideighties, and I still remember the polemics written against her in the weekend supplements, particularly in El País, where the critic Azancot branded her a lesbian and said she owed her unwarranted reputation to the support she had received from T. S. Eliot. That bilious review was a sign of things to come, the era of social media, in which, as Fernando Aramburu recently wrote, creative people are punished for aspiring to find happiness in the public exercise of the imagination and the written word.

  But Sánchez can’t have attached much weight to these reviews of Djuna Barnes because he happily included her in his book. I read Barnes in her day and have good memories of her work; she’s an elegant stylist, combining archaic turns of phrase with innovative flourishes. When she swapped the night (which left her unwell and drunk) for the serenity of day, she became a perfectionist, working, so they say, up to eight hours a day, over three or four days on just two or three lines of poetry. She died, at age ninety, of starvation. Fietta Jarque, who wrote about her, said that no one ever knew if she just forgot to eat or if she deliberately starved herself. The point is, she clearly wanted to leave this life like one facing the dawn head on.

  &

  I would say that “The Duel of Grimaces” recalls one of Djuna Barnes’s stories, the title of which I’ve forgotten, but it’s one I think I read some time ago. In it, Barnes described a mother’s horror at realizing that she has given birth to a son who, from an ethical point of view, is clearly going to grow up to be an immoral, malevolent type, as rotten to the core as herself. The epigraph that Sánchez borrows from Barnes for the start of “The Duel of Grimaces” doesn’t concern these moral questions, but it does show complete contempt for sons in general. It might even be a line taken from that very story: “My son and heir has the character of a rat lost in a drop of water.”

  In “The Duel of Grimaces,” the ventriloquist — it’s clear from the outset that this is the narrator from the first story, which, in turn, suggests a certain continuity from story to story — visits one of his sons, whom he hasn’t seen for twenty years. On discovering that he is an utterly abhorrent individual — “Why, in God’s name, do we insist on perpetuating our sorely deficient human condition?” — the ventriloquist thinks how dreadful it is that, despite knowing full well what a shithole the world is, we carry on as if nothing were wrong; that is, we go on having children “who only increase the number of monsters inhabiting planet Earth.” We go on “adding to the incessant line of useless beings, who, since time immemorial, have been born only to die, one after the other; and yet, on we go, unfazed, waiting for something, anything, fully aware that there is nothing to wait for. . . .”

  Dotted throughout “The Duel of Grimaces” are details that become gradually more pertinent to the subtle crime-novel element that runs throughout the book. One of them — which appears fleetingly, obliquely, in this story, without drawing attention to itself — is the Javan sunshade, that curious artifact with which the ventriloquist will go on to murder the barber from Seville.

  At one point, the son turns on the father and tells him that he’s had enough:

  “You’re really playing with my head, you know. I’m a poet, and you, on the other hand, are an out-of-work ventriloquist, a failure with a foul temper and, what’s worse, full of resentment for all the successful ventriloquists, whom, I’m convinced, you would eat alive if you could.”

  The father’s response displays a combination of calm wisdom and humor:

  “Don’t you worry, I’ll propose a raise for both of us.”

  As replies go, this would appear to have nothing to do with what the son has just said, although in fact it does, because from it you learn that the son doesn’t earn any money either; he, too, is penniless, following in the footsteps of his failure of a father.

  Later on, beneath the deafening clatter of some helicopters on their way to put out a nearby forest fire, we see father and son sheltering — in tragicomic circumstances — in the attic of a neighbor’s house. There they have turned into an impressive pair of grimacers.

  The ventriloquist writes: “My son really liked both the idea of a duel, and the rules of the game: we were to use our most personal, individual, and intimate expressions and take them to their most offensive, devastating extremes, no holding back.”

  The father turns out to be the better grimacer, and his final winning grimace — pulling his mouth wide apart with his fingers and jutting out his teeth while simultaneously using his thumbs to make his eyes bulge — is so monstrous that his poor son, his poor opponent, can’t outdo its gruesomeness and admits defeat. They’re no longer two of a kind. The victor is the older monster, Walter.

  That night, the son — the sad, lost loser, increasingly upset by his defeat — seems to slip into a black, very dark world, a place of fear and distrust, and becomes so terribly fixated on one particular line that he repeats it over and over again like a sick parrot. At the same time, it seems that, all of a sudden, the narrator has begun to spout gibberish, as if sleeptalking, or perhaps having drunk some kind of potion or strong liquor. But all that’s happening is that we’ve found ourselves in the middle of a “dizzy spell.” It’s hard to miss these spells or tedious weak spots in Sánchez’s novel, because, if I remember correctly, they all fall like lead balloons on the unsuspecting reader; these intermissions — lasting, mostly, for several sentences — are so mind-numbingly and painfully dull and ponderous that the reader cannot help but cringe.

  Finally, having left behind Walter and Walter Jr.’s grimacing competition, and having waded through those “dizzy spells,” we get to the final scene of the story, where we learn that the ventriloquist’s univocal problem has been inherited by his miserable son, a specialist in, among other things, getting stuck on a single sentence.

  I didn’t recall that final scene from my previous reading of the story, and when I got to it I was surprised to come across that obsessive “episode of repetition”; that is, the anguished, sick-parrot-style phrase which the creepy son repeats so incessantly, and which made me think of that famous sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; the one where our suspicions about Jack Torrance’s mental state are confirmed. It’s a moment of sheer metaphysical terror. Wendy goes over to see what he’s writing and discovers that her husband is compulsively typing out a set phrase on which he’s become stuck, and which, insist
ently and disturbingly, he keeps repeating over and over: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  The line that the ventriloquist’s son gets stuck on over and over, at one point repeating it up to four times in a row, is:

  There would be no shadows if the sun weren’t shining. There would be no shadows if the sun weren’t shining. There would be no shadows if the sun weren’t shining. There would be no shadows if the sun weren’t shining.

  9

  There’s nothing odder than a neighbor. For one neighbor to kill another is an almost daily item on the news, with a third neighbor invariably coming out to say of the unlikely criminal that he was a perfectly normal person. The other day, someone on television went still further and stated that the murderer on the same floor as him had always seemed “a natural neighbor.” When I heard this, I asked myself — since dying is a law of nature — can anyone be said to have died of natural causes if killed by a natural neighbor?

  The Vichy regime issued a law forbidding Jews to own a cat. The cat belonging to Christian Boltanski’s parents one day peed on a rug on their neighbors’ terrace. That night, those same neighbors, who were generally kind, genteel people, rang the doorbell and said that if Boltanski’s parents didn’t kill the cat, they would denounce them to the Gestapo, because they knew they were Jews.

  Hell is other people, especially neighbors. I remember some friends from Bilbao, who, having happily moved into their first apartment together, as newlyweds, immediately began to hear strange noises coming through the wall. Every night, some bizarre ceremony took place in the adjoining apartment, what you might call “the constant repetition of the incomprehensible”: they would hear spine-chilling laughter, the buzz of electric saws, the cawing of crows, horrific screams. Even when they found out that their neighbors, using the primitive special effects of the time, made their living recording horror stories for the radio, even then they didn’t feel reassured. Neighbors always inspire fear, even when they have an explanation for everything.

  [Whoroscope 9]

  Peggy Day’s oracle for this date says that “a sense of guilt you’ve been dragging around for years could today cause you quite a few problems.”

  It’s a surprising prediction. What will the other Aries think when they read that entry, which, dare I say, I suspect is addressed to me? I can’t help thinking that Peggy, who must by now have received my email, is demanding an apology from me for having disappeared so abruptly at the end of that summer in S’Agaró.

  I will never understand my behavior on that last day of August. Perhaps I wanted to emulate Mr. Invincible, the most admired member of our gang, who, without any explanation, also split up with his girlfriend at the end of that summer. He literally fled from her, and no one ever found out why. And I think I copied that strange impulse, seeing it, presumably, as a decision worthy of being imitated, because it seemed so macho. The point is that I didn’t turn up for my final date of the summer with Juanita Lopesbaño and never saw her again. Once, I mistakenly thought I spotted her in front of a church in Módena. Her back, her figure, especially her behind, were very similar, but I felt horribly disappointed when, expecting to see the Marilynesque features of the Bombshell — as we used to call her — I instead found myself staring at the frigid, rather crazed face of a total stranger.

  Sometimes, I look back on that sudden, senseless flight of mine and I find it impossible to comprehend. And because I know I never will understand it, I tell myself that it could well have been the gesture that began my relationship with the incomprehensible. I behaved in a way that was hard to explain. I fled, and deeply wounded a very nice young woman.

  And yet, I am not to blame.

  &

  We come into this world in order to repeat what those who came before us also repeated. There have been supposedly significant technical advances, but as regards our human nature, we remain unchanged, with exactly the same defects and problems. We unwittingly imitate what those who preceded us tried to do. These add up to mere attempts with very few successes, which, when they do occur, are always second-rate. Every ten or fifteen years, people speak of new generations, but when you analyze those generations, which, on the face of it, do appear to be different, you see instead that they merely repeated, like a mantra, how urgent and vital it is to overturn the previous generation and, just to be safe, the one before the previous one, which, in its time, tried to erase the one before that. Oddly, though, no generation wants to position itself on the margins of that Great Path, but, rather, on the firm ground occupied by the previous generation. They must think there’s nothing else beyond that firm ground, and this belief ultimately leads them to imitate and follow in the footsteps of those they started out despising. And so it goes on, not a single generation has placed itself on the margins or has said, almost as one voice: we don’t like this, you can keep it. The young arrive, only to slink away the next day, no longer young, but old. In fleeing from the world, they’re destroyed; and their memories are destroyed and they die, or they themselves die, so destroying their memories, which were born dead. This rule knows no exception. In this respect, everyone imitates everyone else. As an epitaph on a grave in a Cornish cemetery says: Shall we all die. We shall die all. All die shall we. Die all we shall.

  10

  We have to imagine a Borges completely adrift as a short-story writer, and also blind drunk — as far as I know, he didn’t drink a drop — if we want to find even an echo of his voice in that of the narrator of “The Whole Theater Laughs,” the third chapter in Walter’s Problem which, like all of the chapters in the book, can be read as a stand-alone story. That being said, it’s also true that this is the chapter that least lends itself to being separated from the rest of the book, because, unlike the others, which are sometimes less integral to the memoirs, “The Whole Theater Laughs” contains the scene of the crime, an indispensable moment if the ventriloquist’s partial autobiography is to make the slightest sense.

  Without the Borges quote at the beginning — “I reach my center, my algebra and my key, my mirror. Soon I will learn who I am” — I don’t think I would ever have worked out that the Argentinian was the inspiration behind “The Whole Theater Laughs.” But the epigraph informed me that I would find Borges in the story. I can’t really say that I did. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything of him in the narrator. I suppose, if I were to indulge Sánchez, I would say there is something of Borges in the way he subtly parodies certain dramatic stereotypes, and also in the way the narrative condenses a man’s entire life into a single scene that defines his fate.

  In this one scene, the artist Walter reaches his “center,” the most crucial scene of his life, and he understands that he has to leave, that he must flee and go into hiding. This single scene, which takes place in a theater in Lisbon, is narrated by the ventriloquist himself, who, unless I’m mistaken, isn’t the obvious narrator of all the other stories in the book. I seem to recall that in the fourth chapter, “Something in Mind,” Walter isn’t the narrator. I mean to verify this when I get to the story and reread it.

  Anyway, in the case of “The Whole Theater Laughs,” we’re left in no doubt that it is the ventriloquist who, within the fragile framework of his memoirs, relates to us the brief story of his hasty departure from the stage; an unforeseen adieu for his followers, but one we sense that is justified, for Walter himself implies that if, after this final performance, he were to remain in the city of Lisbon, he would risk spending the rest of his life behind bars.

  What crime could he have committed? It is half implied that something has happened that night, down one of the city’s alleyways, to “the Scraper” (Walter’s nickname for him). But at no point does Walter explicitly recount all of the details of the crime, which Lisbon’s police are yet to uncover; the penny drops slowly, and we work it out from what he, as narrator, gradually reveals.

  What the ventriloquist narrates — in the present tense �
� is the ridiculous way in which he simply goes to pieces in front of his public as he prepares — having reached his center, his “algebra” — to flee to some far-flung corner of the world in order to learn, at last, who he really is. This all takes place in a very tense, improvised scene in which, with the valuable help of his puppet Sansón, Walter relates the pathetic story of his passion for his assistant Francesca.

  In one memorable scene, Walter actually weeps on stage for his lost love as he confesses everything apart from the fact that he has just killed the barber — his beloved’s lover — which is the real reason he must leave the city that very night.

  The whole story revels in the idea of saying goodbye in the most theatrical way possible. Walter’s moving, terrifying farewell to the stage and to everything — he knows that the moment the performance ends, he’ll be off like a shot — begins with an involuntary false note, his voice cracks the moment he opens his mouth to announce that he is going, that he is retiring from the stage.

  It’s an ominous sound, almost identical to that made by the stern professor in The Blue Angel in front of his students. Professor Unrat is on a steady path to ruin when the showgirl Lola Lola makes him fall in love with her just to strip him of his dignity. But that’s where the similarity with Unrat ends, because Walter differs from the German professor in all other respects. Walter has Latin blood, which means that, despite never actually saying as much, he peppers his theatrical dialogue with Sansón with such emotive clues that we can’t help but see, horrifying thought that this is, that he really has committed a crime that very night, killing — in some back alley of the city — the barber who stole Francesca from him.