Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  The nephew, on the other hand, reminds him of Wittgenstein’s nephew, who appears in a work by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard himself follows the example of Diderot’s satire Rameau’s Nephew, dwelling on the possibility that Paul Wittgenstein was, in fact, a more important philosopher than his uncle, precisely because he never wrote anything on philosophy, and therefore didn’t even come out with the famous line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  “But Mac, Sánchez’s nephew is nothing but a bum,” says the voice in my head, as if now, on top of everything else, it wanted to show some common sense too.

  13

  The epigraph to the fourth story, “Something in Mind,” comes from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: “She was very pretty with a face as fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin. . . .”

  As far as I can remember, I’ve only ever seen a fresh face like that once in my life, and it was in Paris too, a real-life scene in the Bois de Boulogne: a woman who, moments before she plunged into the dense mist, turned round just enough to reveal, very fleetingly, a fresh face of imperfect but incredible beauty.

  In my memory, that fragment, that glimpse of the unknown woman who turned slightly before vanishing into the mist, always appears in my mind as if it were a sequence from a movie that gets stuck and repeats itself over and over, never advancing. Whenever I evoke that scene, whenever I recall it, I see it on constant repeat, but I have no way of knowing what happens after the woman plunges into the mist.

  And always, perhaps because it frustrates me to see that I’ll never know the outcome, perhaps because I can see that I’ll never go beyond that interrupted sequence, a tragic, unresolvable doubt arises in me: what happened next? What did the unknown woman do after disappearing into that eternal mist?

  Earlier on, while reading “Something in Mind” — a text that bears the Hemingway stamp from start to finish — I gave to the invisible young woman in that story the fleeting, beautiful face of the enigmatic creature glimpsed one day in the Bois de Boulogne. I was right to do so, because I could then give a face to the character, who is a silent presence throughout the whole of that fourth story. Unlike the three previous stories, it’s clearly not told by the ventriloquist, but written in the voice of a stranger who gives us a plot that would seem to be entirely unconnected with Walter’s memories were it not for the fact that the invisible girl, at least from the little we learn about her, is the very image of Francesca, Walter’s great love.

  “Something in Mind” merely appears to be a banal, insubstantial story: two teenage boys from Barcelona, after going on an idiotic all-nighter, turn up at the home of the grandmother of one of them, at seven o’clock in the morning, to ask her for money so that they can continue their private party in the full light of day. In the background, like a secret story that never fully surfaces, is the rivalry between the two boys for the favors of a very beautiful young girl who is never named, but who is there and whom neither of them forgets for a moment; an almost palpable absence, even though the story appears to do nothing more than reproduce the anodyne conversation between the two teens during their absurdly early morning visit.

  The anonymous narrator, who employs what Hemingway called the Iceberg Theory, pours all his skill into the hermetic telling of that other secret story — two revelers in love with a young woman they never mention — and so skilled is he at the art of ellipsis that the reader becomes aware of that other, absent story of which the girl in question would be the protagonist. Indeed, the narrator writes the story as if the reader already knew that those two wild adolescents had spent the entire night quarreling over that same girl, who, given the epigraph, presumably has rain-freshened skin. But the conversation itself is just idle chitchat, except for one moment when the grandmother asks her grandson why his friend is so extremely timid. Even though the two friends are rivals in love, her grandson Juan denies that his friend is shy at all and, inventing a story on the spot, he tells his grandmother that his friend Luis isn’t the least bit timid, but is merely distracted, that he is thinking about a story of love and death he’s been writing and which was stolen from him just a short while ago.

  The grandmother then wants to know where this theft took place.

  “In a dance hall,” Luis blurts out.

  “Actually,” Juan adds, “it wasn’t really a love story, it was the memoir of a ventriloquist, and you could read it either as a novel or as a book of short stories.”

  “Actually,” says Luis, “it was only a partial memoir.”

  Then the grandmother wants to know why partial. “Because he didn’t tell you everything,” Luis is quick to explain. And Juan adds: “The ventriloquist is one of those guys who’s always thinking about dropping everything and running away, but, in his memoir, the real reason why he does finally run away never comes out.”

  The grandmother then wants to know what the real reason was.

  “Because before leaving Lisbon,” says Luis, “he’d done over the guy who had stolen his girlfriend.”

  “Done over?” asks the grandmother.

  “Yes, and done him in too,” says Luis.

  Silence.

  “Yes, Grandma,” says Juan, “done him in good and proper. Now do you understand? He stabbed him with a dagger which he’d hidden inside a sunshade, but, obviously, the ventriloquist wasn’t going to confess to that in his memoir and so he says something else, I guess to cover up what’s really going on.”

  This fragment from that fourth story, “Something in Mind,” nicely sums up the way in which the whole of Walter’s Problem is told. And so it’s highly likely that Sánchez used this story with the anonymous narrator to explain that the whole novel, of which the story is a part, makes use of the Iceberg Theory. Because while a few relevant things do happen in the book, the secret story, the key story, the scene of the crime, is only ever suggested, it never actually appears; which is perfectly understandable if we put ourselves in Walter’s shoes, because, if he did confess to his crime, he could land himself in big trouble.

  Putting myself in Walter’s shoes might be the first thing I have to do if, one day, I write a “remake” of the novel. Perhaps one way of seeing through the ventriloquist’s eyes would be to transform myself into a jealous type — easy enough, since I already am — one capable of writing a memoir without revealing that he’s killed a barber, but capable, too, of implying this strongly enough for the reader to figure out that he has in fact murdered him, which is why he has to get out and flee Lisbon.

  But in order to experience intensely and authentically the, shall we say, “emotional storm” that might break over him following his crime in that city and his hasty withdrawal from the stage, I might have to find a way of fully identifying with that poor lost soul, Walter. Right now, the only method that occurs to me is the one used by that famous “painter of light,” Turner, when he had himself lashed to a ship’s mast for four whole hours in the midst of a violent storm, in the hope that this would help him get the full measure of nature’s temperament.

  [Whoroscope 13]

  Among my emails I found Peggy Day’s answer to my request for an update on what would happen to me today: “Things couldn’t be better. Far niente and hula-hoops. And a little surfing with a cool breeze behind you, my little sword-swallower.”

  I notice that this time she has omitted the offensive “stupid,” but she’s still clearly in a foul mood. As for that “cool breeze,” she seems to be ordering me to take a running jump, with the coolest breeze possible behind me. She writes: “Things couldn’t be better. Far niente and hula-hoops,” and I notice her weakness for repetitions; not the kind of repetitions that appeal to me, but those that lack imagination and lead you down a road to nowhere.

  In fact, if you stop to observe Peggy’s own most repeated daily activity — her regular horoscopal rulings — you’ll see that there, just as
with the repetitive emails she’s sent me, she has pretty much landed herself in a cul-de-sac. Because really Peggy uses a very limited vocabulary — “dream,” “problems,” “happiness,” “family,” “matters,” “money,” etc. — meaning that she quickly runs out of possible combinations. It’s the kind of poetry of repetition that doesn’t interest me in the least, because it leads one inevitably into a blind alley, a barren, bleak, and fatally dead end.

  Nevertheless, I think that the failure of the investigatory path I opened up with Peggy has been an excellent experience for me as a beginner: it contains a lesson that could prove very useful to me from now on. As is usually the case, we learn from our mistakes. I wanted Peggy’s oracles to work in tandem with my own forays into writing and to relate in some way to my sorties into the subject of repetition. And I did so because I thought that those two things — the oracles and my first literary ventures — would soon start to merge; but that isn’t what happened at all. This business with the horoscopes has turned out to be another dead end, a spring that’s dried up on me and which, at best, I’ll learn to live with. It’s clear that, in using those two things, I was trying to build something out of nothing, perhaps because I can’t yet put it into words. As methods go, it’s not bad at all; writers around the world combine subjects, which, at first glance, have nothing whatever to do with each other, in the hope that this will allow them access to something that exists in the realm of the unsayable. It’s a trick that works in psychoanalysis, but not here in my diary. Or perhaps it does, and I simply haven’t been able to see it. Whatever the case, I now know that opening up two distinct paths and trying to combine subjects which, on the surface, have nothing in common, doesn’t always lead to a positive result.

  14

  This morning I was getting ready to reread “An Old Married Couple,” the fifth story, when, as I listened to Big Bill Broonzy singing “Trouble in Mind,” I gradually forgot what it was I’d set out to do and instead began thinking about how Borges always considered novels to be nonnarratives. They were, he said, too far removed from oral narratives, and, as a result, had lost the direct presence of an interlocutor, the presence of someone who could leave gaps for the reader to fill in, and had, therefore, lost the concision of short stories and folk tales. One had to remember, Borges went on to say, that although the presence of the listener, the presence of the person listening to the tale, is, indeed, a kind of strange hangover from the past, nonetheless, the short story has survived, in part, precisely thanks to that archaism, thanks to having preserved the figure of the listener, that ghost from the past.

  I still don’t know quite what made me think of all of this, but a diary exists as a lasting record of what we were thinking on any given day, just in case, in the future, on rereading whatever we told ourselves that morning, we discover that the things we wrote down without a second thought are now the only rocks we can cling to.

  [oroscope 14]

  Yesterday, the Whoroscope lost its full name, and almost its raison d’être, because Peggy Day erased herself, to put it kindly. And now this is an Oroscope, in part a black ribbon to indicate a definitive goodbye, and, in part, an unremarkable and silent celebration to mark the end of the day. The Oroscope, just like its predecessor, the Whoroscope, is merely prose written as evening falls. While, up until now, I would normally make the most of this hour to focus on Peggy’s oracle, now that I’ve put her astral pages behind me (and still further behind me, her unforgivably paltry and limited combination of words, that is, her dead-end language, doomed to extinction, at least where my diary is concerned), the Oroscope will live on, fulfilling one of its original functions: that of adding to the waning day anything that might be left to add.

  Released from Peggy and her restricted vocabulary, I can now rest, perfectly relaxed, a glass of gin in my hand, not moving from the large red armchair in my room where I once worked as a building contractor and where I now work with my mind, which, frankly, I find infinitely more enjoyable.

  15

  Last night, there I was deep in all kinds of thoughts, and feeling, for some reason, half-engrossed and half-excited, when in through the half-open window flew a parakeet.

  After colliding several times with the ceiling, the bird — green with a white breast — ended up getting trapped down a narrow gap (it’s amazing there was room for it really), about four or five feet deep, where the two main bookshelves form an angle. I feel rather intrigued by this gap now, because, had it not been for what happened last night, I don’t think I would ever have known of its existence, given that, in order to see it, I would, at some point during the many years I’ve lived in this apartment, have had to climb a ladder; but why would I climb a ladder when there was nothing of interest up there?

  Finally, it was Carmen, thinking I was making it up, who scaled a ladder and got a terrible fright when she saw that there really was a parakeet lying at the bottom of the tiny gap she had never noticed either. At first, I thought we’d have to dismantle the two oak bookshelves; otherwise, given the depth and inaccessibility of the gap, the parakeet would remain irretrievable, lost down that unforeseen dark hole, invisible to the rest of the apartment. It would squawk for days and days, and I would sit there writing, unable to see it, but hearing it, and then, well, then the poor bird would die and its remains would begin to decompose, spreading its stench throughout the apartment, and filling up with maggots that would worm their way inside the books and end up eating everything, swallowing the entire history of world literature.

  Rescuing that creature from the narrow depths of that four- or five-foot shaft seemed like an impossible task, but we clearly had to do something.

  “You’ve got to do something,” said Carmen, “and get it out of there.”

  I found the parakeet’s squawks rather inspiring, but I couldn’t say this to her, because it would only have made matters worse. The squawking was helping me to write, especially when the bird communicated — through the open window — with its brothers and sisters, the family of parakeets that appeared to be waiting for it outside. I sat writing in the middle of the imaginary flight path of those desperate cries, which traveled up from the depths and out onto the street, where they were greeted by the squawks of other parakeets who, from the tops of the trees, seemed to be asking my accidental pet where its anguished cries were coming from. And perhaps the worst thing was not being able to say any of this to my wife, because it would only prove to her that I was even crazier than she already thought I was.

  Carmen was growing more and more agitated — she would have been even more so had she known that the bird’s squawking was a source of inspiration to me and was helping me advance in my apprenticeship as a writer — and I was perhaps beginning to feel reluctant to take any action. In all the years of our marriage, I had never realized that she was terrified of birds. Finally, after fruitlessly summoning the local police (who came to the house, but had no idea what to do and washed their hands of what they said was a most unusual case), we called the fire brigade, and they, in turn, called the animal protection league (a free service provided by the city council), and, finally, a young protector of flying creatures — after an anxiety-filled ten-hour wait for him to come and a few painful, strained minutes, because, as we had foreseen, rescuing the bird was difficult in the extreme — he lowered a basket attached to a six-foot-long rope into the gap, and maneuvering the rope with exceptional ingenuity and skill, not to mention infinite patience, he managed to rescue the parakeet. And then, very gently, wearing gloves to protect himself from being pecked, he placed the bird on the highest shelf so that it could escape back out through the window and resume its life in flight. For a few moments, the now liberated parakeet appeared to hesitate, as if it didn’t want to leave.

  And I know this sounds crazy, and would seem strange if not laughable to anyone hearing it, but I’ll burst if I don’t say right here and now: I really miss that poor parakeet.

&nbs
p; 16

  “An Old Married Couple” moves along at a cracking pace thanks to the constant back and forth of blows — or, rather, monologues — of a pair of cuckolds, Baresi and Pirelli, two strangers who have just met and who, perched precariously on their bar stools, begin to tell each other their respective (and almost identical) stories of doomed love.

  Everything happens in the wee hours of the morning, in the bar of a hotel in the city of Basel, where the hopeless pair are drinking nonstop — hence their rather precarious position at the bar — and telling their tales of woe. The story begins with this monologue by Baresi, which I liked a lot. I think I might even learn a thing or two from it.

  “You, sir, have led me to the bottle, or, rather, your confession that you like to hear other people’s stories has driven me to drink (I said to an elegant Italian, an occasional drinking companion in the bar of a hotel in Basel), and now the truth is that I’m completely drunk and a little overemotional, or, to be more precise, I feel rather starry-eyed and in the mood to tell you this story, which you will recall I mentioned in passing when I said that, lately, I’ve noticed a certain propensity on my part to recount episodes from my life, episodes that I sometimes alter slightly so as not to be repetitive or to start to bore myself, Signor Pirelli, if you’ll allow me to call you that, since here everyone seems to be called Pirelli, although nobody goes around wearing a monocle like yours — no, don’t tell me your real surname, I’d have little use for it; for my sole interest is in telling you what happened to me with a compatriot of yours. You might enjoy hearing this story, Signor Pirelli.”