At this point, she did react. With a look of panic. The second I mentioned “the drama,” her entire expression changed. She even began to pay attention to what I was saying, because, for weeks now, there was nothing that struck more fear into her heart than the appearance of that word “drama” in our conversations. And this is because that word, spoken straight out like that, immediately took her back to my obsessive state during the seemingly endless days following my dismissal from the lawyer’s firm where I’d worked my entire life.
In an attempt to hold her attention, to tie it to an imaginary post so that I could say everything I needed her to hear, I told her, as if in passing, that I didn’t want this diary to “open the door to the black dog” — a horrible, hackneyed expression, this metaphor for melancholy — at which point she stared at me in sheer terror. The mere mention of that dog still terrifies her, even more so than the word “drama,” because it reminds her of the days when I lost my job, went completely to pieces, and moped around referring to my despair as the black dog.
I took advantage of her moment of panic — panic at the possible return of the emotional problems which she believed I’d more or less overcome — to tell her that I began writing the diary in part because I thought it might help haul me out of the deep depression I had sunk into when the firm fired me a couple of months ago. And if I wanted the diary to have a therapeutic effect, I had to think up a profession that was a world away from the Law — building contractor was the ideal solution — one that stopped me constantly going over and over my past as a lawyer, at least until — and that day has now come — I noticed that the wounds inflicted by my ruthless, humiliating removal had begun to heal. Despite not being completely sold on the therapeutic value of writing, I had the vague hope that it might help put at least a modicum of that great humiliation behind me. And I was fairly confident that the journal would help me to do just that. It was a matter of untangling, as far as possible, and by means of this discreet apprenticeship in writing, the knotty core of my shame and mortification, my rage at the disgraceful manner in which they threw me out on the street, the scandal of my paltry severance payment, and the shock of finding myself, quite suddenly, with nothing, not even a stern, phlegmatic goodbye from one of my colleagues.
It was a matter of blocking out everything that had the power to upset me and that might seriously hinder the diary’s legitimate function: to make me happy. I was loving these carefree days, where even my strongest-held beliefs were dissolving into easy indifference. And yet, before I could slip into those tantalizing leisurely moments, two things had to happen: I had to spend some of the day working on the diary, and this activity had to bear as little relation as possible to my past as a lawyer, the very thought of which sent me straight back to the drama, the trauma, the black dog, despair, and suicide.
I said all this to Carmen, at which point the strangest thing happened: despite teetering on the edge of that abyss, she allowed herself to make a joke, trying to downplay the whole thing, and declaring in a dulcet, singsong, but nevertheless flippant tone of voice:
“Better an honest but humiliated lawyer than a failed property developer.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. A failed property developer!
Love is blind. I repeated this to myself two or three times. I had to if I didn’t want to slide back into the dark days of my breakdown and go completely to pieces again.
[OSCOPE 22]
It appears we’re only just discovering that the gentle, compassionate approach to leadership makes better business sense than that of “command and control.” Studies in brain function (carried out by such methods as functional MRI) have detected that being treated disrespectfully raises one’s blood pressure and generates stress. “It’s the sure path to depression, the second-fastest-growing condition in developed countries, according to the World Health Organization. Bosses are by definition disrespectful, even if their lack of respect doesn’t always manifest itself in barked-out orders. Leaders, on the other hand, do their best to draw out people’s talent, and for that there needs to be respect, trust, and motivation,” explained the Co-Director of the Executive Education program at Deusto Business School. But I find this hard to believe. The means and methods may have changed, but actually things are even more terrifying than before, perhaps precisely because you trust those around you more and believe that things really are better, and you don’t expect to discover, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, just when you least expect it, the real truth: they don’t love you because they’ve never loved you and they’re firing you because you’re past it and because you’re always causing scenes and because you drink too much and because one day you quoted a few lines from Wallace Stevens when tension was at its highest in that emergency meeting.
23
The ninth story, “The Visit to the Master,” opens with an epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”:
“ ’ Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.”
Yes, only this and nothing more; the Raven is always there in the background, about to rap on the door, or indeed already rapping, or already inside the house, flapping along the corridors. The Raven is Death for someone like me, who, despite my clear vocation as a modifier, is incapable of reading that fragment from Poe in any other way. It’s odd that when confronted by the Raven, I lose all ability to modify. I become a quivering wreck. The Raven always wins. It’s like the zero in roulette. The House always wins. And yet, there are ways to manipulate and cheat that zero. A fake posthumous, unfinished book is one that can laugh at Death, which is otherwise so brazenly, stubbornly accustomed to getting its own way.
Today, for some reason — if I knew why I would feel much better — I woke thinking about the crocodile-skin purse my mother used to carry, and shortly afterward, I recalled the clear plastic purses that reminded Joe Brainard of lunch boxes with a scarf hanging out of them. I remember, as I have said, the ties that came already knotted with a rubber band to hang them round your neck. And then I remembered a time when I found the Raven in everything I read, sometimes as frighteningly clear as one of those plastic purses, like when Bardamu, in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, said: “You have to listen for the melody without notes that underlies all music, a melody composed just for us, the melody of death.”
I seemed to find an echo of Bardamu’s words in that ninth story, in the sudden pronouncement of a man who is Walter’s master: a man who, when he speaks, seems to be that melody without notes that underlies all music.
I was going to read the story this morning, but, in the end, I left it until tonight, and spent all day waiting for darkness to fall so as to increase the likelihood of the Raven making an appearance; this gave rise to several rather comical situations, with that bird appearing on several occasions ahead of time, in the morning and afternoon, in various places in the house, like in a comedy horror movie. . . . How many times a day does it brush past? If we could count them, I think we would go mad.
Jünger describes Céline telling him: “I always have death by my side,” and pointing to a spot next to his armchair, as if a small dog were sitting there.
Ah, if only I’d been able to domesticate Death today as it seems Céline did, demonstrating his remarkable talent as a tamer of beasts.
Anyway, I spent the day waiting for the midnight hour before reading the story, a day interspersed with brief, but repeated surprise appearances by the Raven, who seemed to possess the gift of ubiquity. Who was this master that Walter was going to visit? Another ventriloquist would be the most logical answer. To find out, I had to start reading the story which, since it was the penultimate in the book, would bring me almost to the end of my (re)reading of my neighbor’s novel. As the first shadows began to fall, as dusk came on, I could wait no longer and launched into the story that tells of Walter’s visit to Claramunt, who was, he says, “his
great master,” although, at first, there’s no way of knowing just what that mastery consists of, not that there’s anything strange about that, because Walter himself doesn’t seem to know as he travels toward the remote, out-of-the-way village of Dorm, with no clear idea as to why he has placed Claramunt on a pedestal.
Claramunt had been a ventriloquist for years, but it was not because he was a ventriloquist that he was Walter’s master. As Walter himself writes: “I admired him, but not necessarily for his legendary ability to provide different voices for his multiple dummies, but because of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I adored him, but, strange though it may seem, I had no way of knowing how to pinpoint the root cause of that admiration, although I was quite sure I did admire him greatly, enormously. . . .”
Walter travels to Dorm for precisely that reason, to find out why, for years, he’s been having a recurrent dream telling him that he should travel to the Catalan Pyrenees, to the village of Dorm, and there try to ascertain why the once famous Claramunt is his master. Perhaps that insistent, extremely stubborn dream is a mere delusion. But what if it isn’t? Walter can’t simply do nothing and close the door on a revelation that might perhaps prove vital to him. Intrigued, he travels to Dorm accompanied by María, an old lady brimming with vitality, who, having been both a close friend of his mother and a close friend of Claramunt’s sister, has offered to intercede with the reclusive ventriloquist and persuade the monster to receive them. For it seems that Claramunt is a very bad-tempered fellow, who lives as far as possible from the madding crowd, and who, according to all indications, has become a toothless old grouch, a terrible man, who spits on the floor, lives surrounded by dogs, and who makes a habit of being as unpleasant as possible to anyone who dares come anywhere near his farm.
Claramunt is in a particularly foul mood when, after their long journey, Walter and María knock at the door of his rambling house. At first, because we, as readers, need to speculate about something, we suspect that perhaps what Walter admires about the man is the great panache he showed when he bade farewell to the artistic life, because, as Walter describes the long journey with María to Dorm, he frequently comments on the nobility of Claramunt’s final gesture, on the majesty of that abrupt, unceremonious farewell. More than that, when he evokes the master’s final performance at the Teatro Veranda in Valencia, he recalls Claramunt’s parting words on stage, words that have become the stuff of legend among the older inhabitants of Malvarrosa.
“I am someone whom you have come to know very gradually, step by uncertain step. I am someone who has no name and who never will have a name, someone who is many people and, at the same time, only one person. And I am someone who has demanded your patience, too, because, without ever putting this thought into words, I have asked you to bear tranquil witness, over years and years of performances, to the slow, tentative construction of a human figure. . . .”
While I was reading this farewell speech, I couldn’t help relating that “slow, tentative construction of a human figure” to another almost identical process, the one Walter is following in his partial memoir, where he is slowly constructing (with diversions along the way, for he does allow various other voices to speak) a tentative human figure with a complex personality; his memoir gradually traces the silhouette of a murderer, even though, for perfectly sensible reasons relating to his own safety, he never says as much.
I was impressed by Walter’s faith in going to visit the master, because he remains convinced that he’ll find what he’s gone looking for at the house of the old grouch. And the reason he seems so confident is because he trusts in his own instinctive ability to decipher riddles.
María suggests that Claramunt’s mastery may have its roots in something very simple, possibly in something so obvious that, like the purloined letter in the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, it’s hard to see at first because it’s all too visible.
“You’ll have to hone that instinct of yours,” says María.
In the midst of a great cacophony of relentless barking, Walter and María knock at the door of the house. And something unexpected happens, because it turns out that the monster has a heart:
“When he recognized María, Claramunt was deeply moved and embraced her warmly and shed a few tears. Shortly afterward, the supposed grouch made a very theatrical gesture indicating that we should enter his tumbledown house. We sat at a small table next to the fire, and the monster brought us tea and cakes and wine from the vineyards of Dorm. He wasn’t as fierce as we had been told. But he looked much as we had expected: he wore a dark corduroy suit and was wrapped in various scarves and shawls; he hadn’t shaved for several days, and his one good eye was terrifying. Outside, enclosed in a fenced-off area, the dogs kept up their barking. The pack would stop for a few minutes, then immediately recommence their horrendous howling. It was as if a stranger were constantly trying to break into the house only to be repeatedly driven back by the dogs. I asked Claramunt if he kept them there as protection. No, he said roundly, I keep them for the noise. He pronounced “noise” as if the very word gave him great pleasure. For a moment, I said nothing, glancing surreptitiously around the room, playing to perfection my role as María’s nephew, for that is how she had introduced me, so as to make matters easier.”
María tells Claramunt endless stories about mutual friends, all of whom are now dead, and he listens to her, sometimes even with a glimmer of interest. Every now and then, he spits on the floor. At one point — in a voice that, from the narrator’s description, I imagined to be like the voice of the dead man lodged in my head — he speaks of the lunar eclipse forecast for that night and begins listing the names of cemeteries in Rome, one after another, like a strange funereal litany, his words punctuated by the barking of the dogs.
Night falls, and María and Walter stay for supper, dining on a cheese omelet freshly cooked by the grouch himself, and the talk turns to Portugal, “where I was due to travel some days later for a long tour of the theaters there, but which, in Claramunt’s presence and in keeping with my role as María’s irrelevant nephew, I disguised as a holiday.”
“I understand that the cafés of Lisbon are abuzz with the random ideas of a great many nobodies,” says Claramunt.
And his words sound strange in the night. They seem to have come from some lost piece of prose by Pessoa. What Walter doesn’t yet know is that he will soon be going to Lisbon, where he will kill a barber from Seville with his Javan sunshade.
“The random ideas of a great many nobodies,” María repeated, as if wanting to underline Claramunt’s words.
Shortly afterward, apparently infected by Claramunt’s turn of phrase, she tells a rather weird story about a young man and a parrot traveling on an old French train in a carriage packed with murderers. When she finishes the story, she is absolutely exhausted and so sleepy that her head droops and ends up resting gently on a cooking pot on the table where they have dined.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Claramunt says to Walter.
It’s a very starry night, and the lunar eclipse is due to take place in exactly an hour. They head for a small hill from where, according to Claramunt, they will get a clear view of the phenomenon. At first, they walk along gravel paths and then along dirt tracks, until they reach the top of the hill from which they will have a view of the whole of Dorm.
As they walk, Walter casually asks Claramunt if he can think of any reason why he — as the recurrent dream he’s been having for years seems to suggest — should be his master. “I don’t understand,” says Claramunt. “I’ve admired you for years,” Walter says, “but I still don’t know why.” Claramunt becomes angry and asks if Walter really expects him to explain. With a heavy heart, Walter carries on walking, aware that he has made a blunder asking Claramunt that question, because he alone can find the answer to the puzzle he has come there to solve.
In the distance, they hear music coming from a radio, doubtl
ess from some nearby house. “The neighbors are ghastly,” says Claramunt, breaking the silence. “If you say so,” responds Walter. When they reach the top of the hill, they sit down on the hard ground to await the spectacle of the moon’s disappearance. And there Walter has the impression that, although the opposite may have been true initially, Claramunt is, in fact, prepared to help him find out why he admires him. And so it proves. His master has a sudden flash of inspiration, and, allowing himself to be swept along by it, he begins a litany — almost like a prayer — of his daily activities:
“I wake at eight, and take a ritual dip in a cold bath, where I linger for just a few minutes in winter, but longer in spring. This clears away the cobwebs. I sing while I shave, not very tunefully, because I don’t really have a musical ear, but all the same, I sing along happily enough. I go for a walk around the outskirts of the village, in the opposite direction to where we are now. Then I come home, and breakfast on milk and honey and toast. At midday, I look to see if there’s any mail, but I never get any letters, not a single wretched sign from the outside world. (At first, I thought it was Durán, the postman, withholding my letters because he hated me, but I soon had to accept that all of humanity hated me, not just Durán.) Then it’s lunch, served by Señora Carlina, and a nap. In the afternoon, I imagine there’s an ancient lime tree opposite my house and I sometimes listen to the Beatles on vinyl. From time to time, at night, even though I know all the people of Dorm are afraid of me, I go down to the village and tell them anecdotes from my life as a ventriloquist.”
A light goes on in Walter’s mind, because he suddenly understands where Claramunt’s mastery lies. María was quite right when she said that Claramunt’s mastery might lie in something very simple and straightforward, something hiding in plain sight.
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