Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  “Look at that beginner over there, on the hunt in Coyote.”

  I thought about all the years I’ve been walking around this neighborhood, a slave to my daily rituals. I have all sorts of set habits and routines, and I couldn’t even say now how long I’ve been living this deliberately provincial life in the heart of the big city. My entire family comes from this neighborhood: from my Germanophile great-grandfather to my six grandchildren, the children of my children, Miguel, Antonio and Ramiro, all staunch supporters of misguided political parties with whom I occasionally sympathize, although only at that time of day when I forget that idiocy isn’t a shortcoming specific to a particular age, it’s always existed. It’s part of the human condition.

  I haven’t often left this neighborhood over the course of my life, but I’ve seen my fair share of the world as a keen tourist, and also because I was obliged, when I worked in the construction business, to seek out new markets, sometimes traveling very far afield. For a while now, though, I’ve been following the same short routes that always lead me to the exact same spots in Coyote, and this helps to prevent my diary from turning into a novel, which I’m still dead set against. But this morning, I foolishly forgot about this, and, on several occasions, unwittingly opened the floodgates, exposing myself to events that could very easily have turned into scenes from a novel. I was roaming the streets this morning, on the lookout for the first noteworthy episode, when the voice — the voice of that dead man still lodged in my head — reappeared to tell me:

  “You don’t need to look for anything. Believe me, your life — the one and only great adventure — is enough.”

  “What a cliché!” I replied.

  And not long after, as if it were a consequence of having criticized the voice, I began to get the unpleasant feeling that I was becoming terribly dehydrated. I urgently needed to find a water fountain, or a bar. I felt slightly dizzy, and then my thoughts — one thinks the strangest things at such times — my thoughts turned to the humble status of a man whose highest aspiration at any given moment is simply to get hold of a glass of water. And then a few lines by Borges came to mind, lines which, given my state at the time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to remember in full, although in the end I did: “. . . a man who has learned to be thankful for the modest everyday gifts of sleep, routine, and the taste of water.”

  Feeling considerably more worried than I had been even moments before, I came face-to-face with the news vendor, who, at that very instant, happened to be drinking some water. I felt like snatching the bottle from her, but managed to contain myself.

  “That’s global warming for you,” said the ineffable Venus (as local people call her, I assume with a touch of irony, because she’s far from being beauty personified), and, at first, I didn’t know if she was referring to her own thirst or to me with my ghastly, sweat-drenched look of a man overwhelmed by the heat. When I saw that she was merely referring to her thirst, I felt like venting my anger on that poor Venus and her plastic bottle; then I recalled a friend from earlier days, who was despised by all environmentalists everywhere because, as an industrialist, he was a specialist in contributing to greenhouse gases. And that made me hold my tongue, and instead I simply smiled, as if I were the guardian of some secret.

  “Do you think the heat will last into next week?” she asked.

  Suppressing the urge to tell her that the temperature, if not my fever, would eventually go down, I found myself saying:

  “What’s next isn’t the point.”

  I didn’t hang around to see Venus’s reaction. I left the newsstand without even attempting to buy my usual paper, and entered a bar, where I quenched my thirst, and took a moment to be thankful for life’s modest gifts.

  Minutes later, I was walking happily back from my outing in the suffocating heat; I was only a few steps from home when, in the distance, I thought I saw Sánchez entering Carson’s patisserie, completely oblivious, of course, to the disproportionately large space that he and his ventriloquist’s memoirs have occupied in my mind for the last two weeks. And right there and then I realized how accustomed I’ve become to spending hours each day thinking about either him or that decades-old novel of his, and yet I hardly know the man himself. In fact, he’s a complete stranger. He leads a busy alternative life inside my head — or, at least, he has done so for the last two weeks — but if I told him as much, he wouldn’t have a clue what I was on about.

  Events then seemed to move very quickly. Or perhaps I set them off.

  Standing some way away, with my vision impaired by the sweltering fug, I watched, agog, as I saw Carmen go into Carson’s after him. Wasn’t she at work? I wanted to believe that, as on other occasions, she had managed to get away from the workshop an hour early. The sun was beating down, and it was true that the figures around me were distorted by a kind of shimmering haze, and I told myself that I couldn’t be certain that it was Sánchez I’d seen, still less Carmen close behind him, as if she were pursuing him. But the seed of doubt had been sown. And instead of walking over to the spot where I thought I’d seen Carmen, instead of shedding light on that whole business straight away — or perhaps for fear of shedding too much light on it — I went into our lobby, then crossed the lobby itself, got into the elevator, and finally asked myself what to make of what I’d seen.

  Was it pure coincidence? Or were Carmen and Sánchez involved in some kind of relationship, and was this the story of a long betrayal (as in the title of that story, the one my neighbor plagiarized from Malamud and which I read just yesterday)? Or was it possible that I’d seen neither Sánchez nor Carmen, and the whole episode was a product of the heat wave, which was distorting everything?

  Once inside our apartment, I poured myself a glass of ice-cold water. I then deliberated over whether or not to put this trivial gesture in my diary. The answer wasn’t long in coming. I absolutely must write it down if I didn’t want to lose the sense that what I’m writing is a diary and not a novel. Even more important, I mustn’t forget that, when it comes to writing a diary, anything goes. You can write what you like, even — of course — trivialities; actually, these work especially well in a diary, which is also perfectly suited to reflections, dreams, fictions, short essays, fears, suspicions, confessions, aphorisms, and reading notes.

  I sat down in my favorite armchair and told myself to play it cool and, when Carmen arrived home, not launch straight into an interrogation, still less accuse her of something as ambiguous as the vague something of which I wanted to accuse her. I sat down and resumed my reading of Walter’s Problem. The title of the seventh story was “Carmen.”

  19

  Perhaps because I found yesterday quite emotion-laden enough, I decided to leave it until today to comment on reading “Carmen.” The story opens with a quote from Petronius: “Once again, having to be modest wearies me, as, all my life, has the need to speak slightingly of myself in order to fit in with those who speak slightingly of me, with those who haven’t even an inkling of who or what I am.”

  The words don’t sound like Petronius, but I checked yesterday and found nothing to indicate that they might not be his. Anyway, what Petronius — or whoever — says has little bearing on what happens in the story, which suggests that the quotation is there simply in order to mention Petronius and to point out, indirectly, that “Carmen” belongs to the category of imaginary lives created by Marcel Schwob.

  For Petronius appears in one of the stories told by that French writer’s 1896 book Imaginary Lives. I’ve loved Schwob’s work for many years now. He was the pioneer of a genre that mingles invention and historical facts and which, in the last century, influenced such authors as Borges, Bolaño, and Pierre Michon.

  In the case of “Carmen,” there is a certain amount of invention, and, of course, a complete absence of historical facts. And yet the facts drawn from reality — selected solely from the life Carmen led just before I met her — are so skillf
ully intermingled with fiction that the entire thing could be historical. In other words, the story is well constructed, and even the inevitable “dizzy spell” works, because unlike the others I’ve so far encountered, this “dizzy spell” lasts only a few seconds and, while it isn’t the least bit tedious, it is slightly dizzying. “Poor Carmen kept accumulating little pellets of Kleenex in her jeans pocket because she was always forgetting to remove the ones she’d left in there.”

  Entering that story was a very strange, not to say incredible, experience for me, but I had to accept it, because there could be no doubt that Sánchez had written about Carmen when she was very young: “So, here we have a young woman with a broad, anemic face, which perhaps highlights the harmonious nature of her features, but who is, nonetheless, very charming. She’s tall, with delicate breasts, and always wears a dark sweater, and, around her pale neck, a scarf. . . .”

  At first, I felt like killing him. Because, hard though I found it to believe, this was definitely Carmen, my wife, and also because I didn’t know what else to do when confronted by Sánchez serenely describing, for example, her “delicate breasts.” And how come Sánchez had written about her thirty years ago, and yet I knew nothing about it?

  Then, in order to not go entirely crazy and while I waited for Carmen to come home and perhaps explain everything, I amused myself by analyzing the story’s place within Walter’s Problem. And I told myself that the most likely answer was that “Carmen” was a totally independent text that could function as a hint to attentive readers that the whole of Walter’s memoir was one long imaginary life; but it also occurred to me that while the story might seem to bear no relation at all to the ventriloquist’s autobiography, it might, in time, become integrated into the whole and could even be seen as a story, for example, about Walter’s first girlfriend.

  Of course, when I thought about it, I had to acknowledge that the life of the young Carmen could not be said to be exactly imaginary, at least not to me, since I was familiar with many of the things he described, and which were taken directly from her real life before she met me. Reading the story yesterday really shocked me, but now, in the cold light of day, and, I won’t deny it, with some effort on my part, I can see that it was a good idea to include the story in the ventriloquist’s autobiography, because at least that way there are two women in the book — Francesca and the first girlfriend, or whatever role Carmen appears to play — and it makes the whole thing more flexible somehow — a young woman with a broad, anemic face could well be relevant to Walter’s life — and also because it paves the way for the great Petronius to make his entrance.

  That was the best thing of all. I’ve been drawn to Petronius ever since I was a child. For a long time, I thought of this Roman writer merely as the genial character in Quo Vadis, the movie which, every year, over the Easter holidays, my school would show at one of their matinees of “religious cinema.”

  The apparent fixation on Quo Vadis on the part of those Jesuit priests must have arisen out of a misunderstanding, because it isn’t exactly a serious movie or, indeed, religious: the Emperor Nero, for example, thanks to Peter Ustinov’s performance, was a highly comic figure, a Nero who thought he was a poet and would torment poor Petronius with the ghastly poems he wrote. Petronius would sometimes have to express a view on them, until the day when, unable to cope with the stress of being Nero’s sole critic, he committed suicide. Petronius also had his comic side in Quo Vadis, because, shortly before taking his own life, he wrote a wonderful farewell letter to Nero:

  “I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive is the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero — murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you — do not mutilate the arts. Farewell, but compose no more music. Brutalize the people, but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius, so much so that I’ve chosen to kill myself rather than have to continue listening to your ridiculous attempts at poetry.”

  These words are from the movie based on the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel, but, for many years, I thought they were the actual words Petronius had written to Nero before liberating himself from him in the most effective way possible, by taking his own life. I didn’t discover the other Petronius until I came across Schwob’s book, in which I encountered a very different character to the one created by Sienkiewicz. Schwob’s Petronius had written sixteen adventure stories, all of which had been read by only one person, his servant Syrus, whose enthusiasm for them bordered on the hysterical. So enthusiastic was he, in fact, that his master decided that the two of them should go forth and live the adventures described in those sixteen stories. And thus, one night, knowing that Nero had sentenced him to death, Petronius, accompanied by his faithful slave Syrus, discreetly, silently, fled the Emperor’s court. They took turns carrying the small leather satchel containing their clothes and their money. They slept out in the open, tramped country roads, and even, possibly, stole. . . . In short, they began to experience for real the sixteen adventures that Petronius had written. They went here, there, and everywhere, always with their leather satchel. They were traveling magicians, provincial charlatans, the companions of vagabond soldiers. And finally, in his memorable conclusion to this biography, Schwob says: “While living out the life he had imagined, Petronius completely forgot about the art of writing.”

  These were the thoughts with which I distracted myself yesterday, pondering the entirely unimaginary part Petronius had played in my life, until — since Carmen still hadn’t come home — I again asked myself that unavoidable question: why had Sánchez written a story about her thirty years ago?

  The anemic young woman in the story was different from the one I knew, but she was still perfectly recognizable, because what Sánchez described, in however distorted a form, was her life just before we had met — in a strange and genuinely amusing way, perhaps manipulated by invisible forces. She had happened to bump into me on a street corner in Coyote, we had gone for coffee together, and, four months later, crazy about each other in the best sense of the word, we got married.

  Everything Sánchez describes in the story took place before that fateful encounter in Coyote, and sometimes it’s pure invention, like the marriage of a very youthful Carmen to a gentleman from Olot, who, of course, never existed in real life. He’s described in my neighbor’s book as a complete and utter bore, and, luckily, he died very young. Carmen had already had enough of this husband — or, rather, character — even before they married, as can be seen from this fragment: “I never met Carmen’s husband, an industrialist from Olot, who, according to what I’ve been told, was a real hick — which was bad enough — and not her type at all. They got married in Barcelona, in the church of Nuestra Señora de Pompeya, and all that remains of the big day are a few faded photos in which Carmen appears wearing the most brazen of smiles. Ah, dear God, how boring, she apparently said as the car set off for their honeymoon, all of which was to be spent in the endless tedium of the Plain of Vic, the long north-south depression constituting the nucleus of the administrative region of Osona, in the province of Barcelona. . . .”

  Having got sidetracked along unexpected paths to Osona, I now return to the mystery of how, thirty years ago, Sánchez came to write about the life of the young Carmen, a mystery that was easily resolved when Carmen returned home thirty minutes after I’d seen her go into Carson’s patisserie. In response to my almost tremulously urgent question, she told me, quite calmly, that Sánchez had indeed written that story thirty years ago, taking his inspiration from the life she’d led when she was very young, adding a little “imaginary life” to the mix in the form of the dead, boring industrialist, and other equally minor and doubtless clo
yingly sentimental details.

  My discovery of the story had, nevertheless, left me feeling lost and half-crazed. What was she doing there in the very book I was thinking of rewriting and improving?

  I can see the scene as clearly as if it were happening now, when, as soon as Carmen arrived home, I asked if she’d just come from the patisserie.

  “Of course, where do you think I got these cakes from?” she said.

  “Did you meet anyone else?”

  This question rather disconcerted her, and she paused briefly before answering.

  “No. Why?”

  That’s when I told her that, incredible though it might seem, I had just read a story about her written by Ander Sánchez.

  “Really?” she said.

  At no point did she seem in the least troubled. She told me that she’d briefly gone out with Sánchez, about a million years ago, one summer lost in the depths of time, and before she met me. Young Sánchez wrote the story afterward, inventing a hideous husband from Olot for her and promptly killing him off, and it was then that she’d decided never to give the matter another thought, for, as I was doubtless aware, she didn’t care a bit about “literature and or any other such literordure.”

  “Wasn’t Sánchez in the patisserie today?” I asked.

  “Have you installed a secret camera there or something?”

  “No, I just happened to see the two of you going in there together, that’s all.”

  She looked at me incredulously, as if she thought I must have lost my mind. And then she shrugged, unconcerned by what I was insinuating.