“You really should find something to fill your time,” she said. “You must be very bored. Besides, Mac, all that happened years ago. Three decades ago, I think. And ‘decades’ really tells you how remote it feels. Decades, yes, decades!”
Her relationship with Sánchez, she explained, had been nothing but a brief youthful fling, one of many she’d had at the time and had never told me about, because it never crossed her mind that there was any need to reignite the dead flame of insignificant passions, to stir the ashes of so many banal affairs. She sometimes saw Sánchez around the neighborhood, and had done so for years. Yes, she saw him in the supermarket, outside the Baltimore and in Bar Tender, and at the patisserie — indeed, a moment ago, she’d watched as, with excruciating slowness, he bought some éclairs — and at Bar Treno and in the Korean restaurant and in Bar Congo and in the watchmaker’s owned by the Ferré brothers and in the Caligari cinema and in the cramped changing room at the local tailor’s, at the hairdresser’s and at Restaurante Viena and at the cash machine in Calle Villarroel, at the florist’s and so on. She left our apartment at least three times more than I did, so, obviously, she saw Sánchez more often. She didn’t even say hello when she saw him because he was so full of himself and, besides, she was sure he wouldn’t recognize her now, all these years after that lost summer.
I eyed her distrustfully, and Carmen held my gaze so fiercely that I froze. We remained silent for a few seconds, and I remember that the only sound was the agonizing tick-tock of a clock which I’d always thought of as fairly discreet. Then, suddenly, Carmen asked why I was reading that book by Sánchez when I’d been told it was dreadful, just like all the others he’d written, at least according to Ana Turner.
“Did Ana Turner tell you that?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she said.
She asked me how I’d recognized her in the story. Since the question was absurd and the answer glaringly obvious, it seemed to me that she was now the one trying to change the subject. She didn’t succeed. You clearly don’t remember that, among other details, he lists all your early suitors. That’s true, she said. And then, I went on, there’s the part where, in a letter, the narrator tries to describe to a girlfriend the color of the sea, when, in fact, he’s talking about the color of your eyes.
All that remained was for me to read out the relevant passage: “How can I explain the intense blue of the sea? It was sapphire blue, but a very bright sapphire; the color of her eyes, her transparent but indecipherable eyes, which had a kind of purity, at once limpid and solid, cheerful and bright, and unique beneath this pale blue sky, white with mist.”
It’s odd, but a moment ago, when I was transcribing that part about the sapphire blue eyes, I experienced a sudden, irrational feeling and I fell hopelessly in love with Carmen all over again, just as I had when we first met.
Are we in control of our destiny or do invisible forces manipulate us? I ask myself this as I hear Carmen going into the kitchen, doubtless to prepare our lunch. I hear her footsteps moving away down the corridor and remember another fragment from the story:
“Rebellious daughter of the Egyptian goddess Isis, lovely and pale as the night, stormy as the Atlantic, Carmen became an expert in causing despair.”
I clutch my head in despair, I don’t know quite why, perhaps it’s merely a sense of doomed love, or despair at feeling so much love and such a terrible fear of losing it.
20
I was aware that certain stories can have quite an overwhelming effect on readers, but I’d never experienced this myself. After the events of yesterday, I now know that they can, for example, make you fall back in love with your wife of many years. And the strangest part of all this is that I’ve just seen that the next story after “Carmen” in my neighbor’s book is called “The Effect of a Story.” And faced by this, I no longer know what to think, because this latest coincidence feels like one too many. I refuse to believe that I’ll find the story of my renewed love for Carmen, but if that were the case I’d have no choice but to read it as a sign that the real world — and not me, of course — has gone mad.
In any case, the fact that the story after “Carmen” has this title has done me a favor, because it’s helped me to imagine something I don’t think I’ve ever thought about before, namely, books in which the reader reads about what’s happening in his own real life as it happens.
All of which leads me to suspect that what’s going on with me is this: before the time comes for me to set about rewriting my neighbor’s novel, my reading of the book is obliging me to actually live out certain scenes first.
Could that be it? At this stage, I wouldn’t rule out anything. And since my imagination is on overdrive and my levels of paranoia are running high, I now wonder whether agents from the Adjustment Bureau haven’t been secretly plotting my ruin as a businessman in order to lure me more easily into starting a personal diary that would lead to me planning a remake of Sánchez’s drunken novel, and, at the same time, that would offer me an irresistible opportunity to fall back in love with my wife, which is precisely what happened to me yesterday. . . . Although you could also see all of this another way, as one big practical joke played on me by those hypothetical adjustment agents: to leave me bust, with no more options left in the business world, and all so I might come to know the joys of some marginal activity (writing) and the happiness that comes from rediscovering the pleasures of a dull, stable, and decidedly uneventful marriage.
The Adjustment Bureau I’m referring to comes from the movie of the same name, which I saw only recently on TV. It’s an adaptation of a very short story by Philip K. Dick involving Kafkaesque clerks or agents of Fate, men from the so-called Adjustment Bureau, functionaries who control and, when necessary, manipulate the fates of human beings.
“Do you think these agents are conspiring to turn your diary into a novel?” the voice asks.
That’s precisely what I was thinking, which renders any response redundant.
&
At around midday, I read “The Effect of a Story” and, as was to be expected, the world hadn’t gone completely mad, and my dilemma — as to whether we control our own Fate or if invisible forces are manipulating us — was more or less resolved, because the story didn’t contain any tales of rekindled love, or anything of the sort; I could rest easy in the knowledge that it bore no relation to my private life.
If there was one obvious detail in that eighth story from Walter’s Problem, it was that Sánchez had drawn on “I Used to Live Here Once,” a brief, heartrending ghost story written by Jean Rhys. In fact, the epigraph was a line by Rhys: “That was the first time she knew.” And the story Walter told had clear echoes of “I Used to Live Here Once,” in particular in terms of the plot, which was very similar.
At the beginning of “I Used to Live Here Once,” we meet a woman crossing a stream, a precarious route — stepping-stone by stepping-stone — but which she clearly knows by heart. The woman makes her way, convinced that she’s returning to her house. Only the sky above gives her a slight sense of unease. It seems to her somehow different, perhaps because of its gray, glassy appearance. Once on the other side of the stream, she stands in front of the worn stone steps up to a house, next to which a car is parked, a detail that surprises her greatly. What — had she never seen a car before? A boy and a little girl are playing under a big mango tree in the garden. “Hello,” she says, as if to shore herself up. But the children don’t notice her there and carry on playing as if nothing had happened. “I used to live here once,” the woman says, and instinctively holds out her arms to them. The boy’s gray eyes look directly at her, but he doesn’t see her. “Hasn’t it gone cold all of a sudden. D’you notice? Let’s go in,” the boy says to the girl, his playmate. The woman’s arms fall to her sides and the reader then reads the line he was so dreading and with which the story ends: “That was the first time she knew.”
In
“The Effect of a Story,” Sánchez/Walter uses Rhys’s story as a starting point from which to go on to connect literature and life, describing the sense of alarm provoked in a young boy called Manolín on inadvertently overhearing his father reading the Jean Rhys story out loud to his mother. Young Manolín is deeply affected by what he hears, because the story has revealed to him the fact that all of us, sooner or later, must die, and that, after death, we will revisit our family home and nobody will recognize us. We will be ghosts. Manolín then goes on to ask himself why he had to be born if only to die, and whether his parents conceived him just so that he could experience death.
“It was evening in New Orleans when poor Manolín’s hand began to tremble and his glass of milk fell to the floor, and he challenged me to repeat the story. He looked so affected by what he’d overheard that it didn’t seem right to repeat a single word of the story which, just moments before, I’d been blithely reading out loud to his mother. And I remember being surprised at the powerful effect the story had on him, given that it was hardly an easy one for a child to understand. But Manolín, visibly upset, kept repeating, like a ghost: ‘I used to live here once, I used to live here once . . . ,’ after which he fell silent, thoughtful, uneasy, until he collapsed, exhausted, and finally fell asleep. He didn’t leave his bed for three days, although the doctor repeatedly told us that there was nothing wrong with him.”
The doctor in the story — and this is hardly an irrelevant detail — is from Seville, and toward the end of the tale it becomes clear that the action — including the very lengthy “dizzy spell,” during which it seems that a mystery narrator, our Jean Rhys impersonator, has the hangover from hell, perhaps from seven thousand shots of neat rum — the action takes place in a New Orleans that bears a remarkable resemblance to Seville. This resemblance is quite a feat, because the two cities have nothing in common, and yet the narrator manages to convince us that they do, and while never actually saying so, the narrator makes it clear that the child from the story is the future barber from Seville at the very moment when he realizes that, sooner or later, he is going to die. Perhaps the only thing young Manolín doesn’t know is that he will be murdered by a ventriloquist in a dark alleyway in Portugal. The doctor takes up the story:
“Never in all my life have I seen a sadder face than that of poor Manolín during the three days he spent in bed. ‘What time will I die?’ he asked us on the afternoon of the third day. His mother didn’t know what to say. And I, who am not a member of the family, was equally at a loss to know how to help in such a complex situation. ‘I know I’m going to die,’ the boy said. ‘The story from the other day said so.’ And we were so shocked by his remarks that we had to look away, before finally forcing a reassuring smile.”
At one point, we’re told that near New Orleans, on the seashore, all the young boys and girls wander around with long faces. By now, we’re nearing the end of the story:
“That night, Manolín had recovered some of his usually inexhaustible vitality and, as if taking his cue from our earlier smiles, he began to laugh at absolutely everything. The slightest thing would set him off. He wasn’t the same boy though. His childhood had come to an abrupt end. He had learned of the indestructible reality that we call death, and all because he happened to overhear that story. This knowledge had made him ill, but also free to respond as he wished. Free to laugh, for example. And God alone could tell how much that boy laughed, because he laughed so much it was impossible to know exactly how much, for he would burst into loud guffaws that left his face contorted into a terrible, anguished grimace.”
And so ends “The Effect of a Story,” and with it the adventures of a boy who, in time, in a Lisbon alleyway, learned just how much truth there was in the story he chanced to overhear in childhood.
And I’ll leave it there for today. I’m sleepy now, and it’s probably best just to think that tomorrow’s another day, etc. etc. That’s how diarists speak, isn’t it? Carmen is watching TV in the living room. I double-lock the front door to the apartment, but not without first peering through the spyhole to check the lie of the landing, and I have fun observing the one triangular bit of bannister that’s visible. Everything is silent. There appears to be not a single neighbor in the building. Most people, though, will be indoors, and many of them already sound asleep. I imagine Sánchez in the building next door, he, too, safe in his apartment, bedding down for a night of replenishing sleep, but then, quite suddenly, jumping to his feet, as if the slightest of noises, coming from underground, had alerted him to the as-yet-undefined danger that I, his neighbor, represent to him; I, who, unbeknown to him — or anybody — have spent weeks thinking constantly about all the modifications I’ll make to Walter’s memoirs. And I haven’t even finished reading them yet.
[OSCOPE 20]
I’ve thought about it, and although I am a little the worse for wear and I know I really should take myself off to bed, I’ve thought about it and I’m keen not to forget it, which is why I think I’d better write it down here, even if I am dog-tired. I don’t think it’s such a bad thing, or even particularly baffling, that Sánchez should include a story from the barber’s childhood in Walter’s memoirs. In fact, I’m beginning to think that he’s really hit on something by including stories that are only indirectly related to the main body of our ventriloquist’s autobiography. After all, a man’s life isn’t shaped solely by events at which he himself is present. Things that might seem totally unconnected to his world can end up shedding more light on his life than those that involve him directly.
This reminds me of the first time I saw something like this going on in an artist’s biography. Years ago, I read a book about Baudelaire in which the chronology of his life began with the birth of his grandfather and ended four years after the poet’s death with a section in which the biographer examined Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval’s aimless wanderings along the boulevards, on crutches and talking to herself. Even then, I found it intriguing that the biographer considered those wanderings to form part of Baudelaire’s life.
Sometimes, a few sidelights shining in from the wings can make all the difference center stage.
&
I wake up and waste no time in jotting down the only thing I remember from my nightmare. Someone, with extraordinary persistence, was saying to me:
“The thing is, it’s just really weird to be reading a story written by your neighbor donkey’s years ago.”
21
If you ask me, reality doesn’t need anyone to organize it into a plot; it is itself a fascinating, ceaseless creative center. But there are days when reality turns its back on the aimless drifting center that is life and tries to give events a novelish turn. I resist then, because I don’t want anything to interrupt my work as a diarist. I resist with the same sense of horror that Jekyll does in the presence of Hyde, when he realizes that he, the good, just man, is totally at odds with the “extraneous evil” he carries within him. This is what happened today when reality insisted on revealing to me, with the best and brightest light at its disposal, its own ruthless novel-writing machine, which, for a long while, made me feel most uncomfortable, until I succumbed and let myself be drawn toward a faltering neon sign at the end of the street where the ancient Bar Treno is located, with its own peculiarly horrible light.
How many years had it been since I last walked down that murky street? Could it be the street I’ve least frequented of the entire Coyote district? I’d spent years avoiding it and probably for good reasons, and yet, the sight of that neon sign in broad daylight was calling to me, and shortly afterward, I found myself sitting in an inhospitable corner of Bar Treno, the most spacious, but also the most outdated bar in Coyote. I went in for a much-needed double espresso, which is why I didn’t bother to look for a more salubrious bar, which, besides, didn’t exist, at least not on that street.
I sat down at one of the tables in the least appealing area immediately beyond the old
-fashioned bar, that impossibly long ancient bar with shelves above it, resembling an old-style McDonald’s. My table was the last one this side of the large smoked-glass screen separating one part of the bar from the next, and which prevents you from seeing the customers on the other side, although you can hear them perfectly well. And there, before I even had time to suspect that I might not emerge unscathed from my choice of table, I was astonished to hear, coming from the other side of the glass screen, the odious, carping, brassy voice of Sanchez’s nephew.
Good grief, I thought, it can’t be him, but it was. He was ranting on at two young women about the appalling state of the literary world, a world where men in suits were discarding anything they judged to be too weighty, too meaningful. . . . “We’re in the hands of monsters,” he suddenly declared. And he began to explain the gulf that existed, according to him, between a novelist who writes bestsellers with all the superficiality of a hack journalist, and a writer of great depth such as . . . Mundigiochi.
He said Mundigiochi, that’s the name I heard. Perhaps the difference between the Mundigiochis and the bestsellers, he said, is the same as that which exists between a writer who knows that any well-crafted description contains both a moral gesture and a desire to say what hasn’t yet been expressed, and the writer of bestsellers who uses language simply to achieve an effect and always puts on the same immoral camouflage to deceive the reader. Fortunately, he concluded, there are still a few authors who, in their struggle to create new forms, continue to fight the good fight.
It was like the Sermon on the Mount.
I couldn’t believe it: there he was spouting some of the oldest clichés in the book about the publishing industry, and, to judge by the responses of the two young women, they appeared positively dazzled by what the antagonistic nephew was saying. It would seem, I thought, that the people working for the Adjustment Bureau really are doing their best to make things happen to me. However, if that were true and the Bureau really did exist, I have to say they aren’t doing a very good job, because the wretched antagonistic nephew’s spiel was, to put it mildly, utter drivel. And as if that weren’t enough, after a brief pause, I heard him say that the most interesting people were those who have never written anything. What then, I wondered, are we to do with the Mundigiochis?
Mac's Problem Page 11
