“I understood then why he had abandoned his art. His finest work was now his daily routine,” Walter writes.
Claramunt was a master of the intelligent use of his time. Proof that there was life beyond ventriloquism.
“I remember the moment of illumination that preceded the eclipse. A crow flew past, and it was as if a wall had crumbled, and I had the sense that Claramunt and I could understand each other in a zone that went far beyond our meeting there and beyond this life. He could read my thoughts, and had realized that what had happened to him was happening to me. And even if this wasn’t true, everything led me to believe that we were both in agreement that not only were we meeting somewhere outside of Dorm, we were also somewhere far beyond that starry night encompassing the world.”
&
In a wing of the mezzanine, in the middle of the night, a woman with long black hair sat bent over some papers. I admired her profile, her dark, dark hair, her air of being a workaholic. Excuse me, I said, does anyone here know Mr. Poe’s daily routine?
24
Thankfully, I wasn’t so paranoid as to imagine that the neighbor in “The Neighbor,” the tenth and final story in the book, would turn out to be Sánchez, or even myself. All the same, I began reading it with some trepidation. Ever since Carmen had appeared in “Carmen,” it made sense to be ready for anything, even for the totally unexpected, which I suppose might, for example, be the sudden reappearance of death, even though I have a relatively good handle on that eventuality, because I’m keeping the Raven well under control: he’s a poor black dog. He’s also the dog of my depression, of my crisis following my dismissal; I keep him down there on a leash.
I won’t say any more about that, because I want to lighten the tone a little and explain that “The Neighbor” begins with an epigraph from G. K. Chesterton: “We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor.”
This quote had some influence over my reading of the story’s opening lines, where I had a very curious sensation, as if I were reading a fine English short story that had been translated into Spanish with exquisite care. Walter, who shows a real talent for parodying Chesterton, recommends that we dive into his story as if we were “at home, with chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” And how could you resist such an invitation, even if you didn’t happen to have any chestnuts handy or a fireplace, and even if, outside, the temperature had reached sweltering, record-breaking highs?
The story begins auspiciously, but soon forgets all about this wintry setting, and so we, the readers, can only assume that, due to sheer laziness on the author’s part, the narrative thread involving chestnuts has fallen by the wayside. Whatever the truth of the matter, the story’s astonishing opening, with its meticulous description — amounting almost to personification — of each and every spark flying up from that blazing fire, finally loses momentum, and we find ourselves trapped inside a strangely soporific, smoldering atmosphere, in a bland, confusing passage — almost like an homage to the book’s own “dizzy spells” — which made me stop reading and look up from the page.
An extraordinary beginning can sometimes be prejudicial to the rest of a story, because the rest of the text cannot possibly maintain the same high standard. I looked from the page up at the ceiling — as if nostalgic for the story’s now fading brilliance — and my eyes alighted on a tiny spider in one corner of the ceiling, and, in my mind, I began to wander through Chesterton’s world and remembered his story “The Head of Caesar,” in which Father Brown says: “What we all dread most is a maze with no center. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.”
How long had it been since I’d thought about those words? And why had they suddenly come back to me on glimpsing, or perhaps only sensing, the presence of that tiny spider? As I searched for an explanation I was sure existed, I became entangled in a mental spider’s web, which eventually led me to Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles movie, in which the fragments we’re shown of the life of Mr. Charles Foster Kane have always seemed to me the very image of a nightmarish existence, a maze with no center. And I thought, first, about the movie’s opening sequence, when we see what remains of Foster Kane’s accumulated treasures. Next, I thought about one of the movie’s final sequences, in which we see an elegant but wretched-looking woman, Foster Kane’s second wife, sitting on the floor in a mansion doing an enormous jigsaw puzzle. This scene provides us with the vital clue: there is no unity to these fragments, and the vile Charles Foster Kane, the business magnate whose strange biopic we thought we were watching, is a mere simulacrum, a jumble of illusory appearances. . . . There are great gaps in Kane’s life story, important events are left out, and the movie focuses instead on the tiniest of details, as well as on minor characters who have only a tangential relationship with the tycoon.
With my own thoughts still lost in this maze of illusions, it occurred to me that Citizen Kane had certain points in common with Walter’s memoir, which is also made up of brief snapshots of life, of fragments that lack any unity, but which, at all times, seek to relate, however obliquely, the twists and turns, however insignificant, of an artist’s life; a trajectory composed of pieces that gradually form a grim jigsaw puzzle that might have been called A Ventriloquist’s Life; a life that is, simultaneously, a maze in the form of a spider’s web with no center, and also a nightmare, although in this case, in the final chapter, the narrator not only finds the center of the maze, he also discovers within it an unforeseen and decidedly anomalous clearing in the undergrowth, which leads him to think that any escape follows its own entirely separate path. . . .
As soon as I set off along said path, I felt my spirits lift. It seemed to me that “The Neighbor” had picked up again, and it began to dawn on me that, despite the usual anxieties, I couldn’t go on ignoring the fact that my life had entered a phase not unlike a mirror that reflects, however vaguely, only the most sublime things. As a reader, the sky was my limit. Or, to paraphrase Gombrowicz, as a reader I was nothing, and so could get away with anything. Such feelings of joy don’t come around very often, which made me suspect that my sense of well-being must emanate from my tireless work as a literary novice.
From then on, I flew through “The Neighbor” as if there were a perfect confluence between the story and my reading of it, which meant I was soon captivated by a scene in which I seemed to identify completely with the vagabond Walter, who, “walking in the light of the star of my destiny,” as he puts it, finally came to a small Portuguese town near Évora. There, in a dimly lit local bar, he chanced to overhear a story told almost in a whisper by a fellow customer; a story that was as much about a young man from the town — a Jew called David, known for his stern, unforgiving nature — as about his next-door neighbors, a family of black Angolans — a husband and wife and their three children — who, according to the locals in the bar, were recent arrivals.
The João family had been berated by everyone for trying to pass themselves off as genuine country folk, when, in fact, they knew nothing at all about farming. That evening’s story in the local bar, the one Walter overheard, had actually begun the moment the Jewish neighbor told the João family, or rather bellowed at them, that when it came to matters agricultural they were downright useless; that is, it all started the moment he repeated to them what the rest of the town had already been saying — sometimes in rather vicious terms.
That story of the young Jew and the João family, told in the dim light of that local bar in a small Portuguese town, continued with a chilling scene that took place only days later: on finding a chicken from his Angolan neighbors’ farm running loose on his lawn for the umpteenth time, the stern, unforgiving young David fired eight shots at the unsuspecting chicken, reducing it to a ball of blood and feathers. From that moment on, and with good reason, the Angolan family were terrified of their neighbor.
“But that was all just a preamble to the story I really wanted to tell you, and which happened only yest
erday,” said the customer recounting the tale, and there was a slight change in the inflection of his voice.
And what he told them was this: in the absence of their parents, who had gone off on a flying visit to Évora, the three children had spent the whole of the previous afternoon trotting about on the family horse, an ancient, world-weary mare bought at a knockdown price by their kindly parents. They rode the poor animal for so long that, finally, utterly exhausted, she strayed from the path and collapsed on the lawn of the stern, unforgiving young Jew. And right there, on that very spot, probably the worst place she could possibly have chosen, she promptly died. The three children froze in terror and then, as if they were chickens at risk of being turned into a ball of blood and feathers, they ran home and hid in the barn, where they decided to stay put until their parents returned from Évora. Every now and then, the children peered out of the barn window to see what the neighbor was doing. The young Jew stood staring in disbelief at the dead horse lying on his lawn, and then he looked over at the barn, where the children quickly ducked away from the window. When night fell, the neighbor again went out into his backyard and, sitting on the lawn very close to the mare, he, too, waited for the parents to return. When they did, at around midnight, they were dumbstruck, horrified to discover what had happened. They knelt down beside the poor beast and wept; they wept as if they were weeping for themselves and for the whole world. By the light of the small fire the young Jew had lit in his backyard and which cast ever deeper shadows over the dead body, the mare seemed to take on monstrous proportions. The couple feared the even more monstrous words that the young Jew would say, and the measures he would take, but, instead, most unexpectedly, he went gently over to them and began to console them. He fondly patted them on the head, and, still by the light of the fire, he very slowly and softly told them in more detail about the poor animal’s sudden demise before going on to recount — taking his time and speaking with extraordinary gentleness — a story that was, in fact, an ancient Hasidic legend, although he didn’t reveal its Hasidic origins to the Angolans, because having to explain the meaning of the word “Hasidic” seemed unnecessarily complicated.
The story went as follows: once upon a time, on the outskirts of a village, a group of Jews were observing the end of the Sabbath together, seated on the floor of a wretched little hovel. They were all from those parts, with the exception of one man, who nobody knew: an extremely poor, raggedly dressed man crouched in a dark corner of that cheerless house. . . . The conversation, which had touched upon all sorts of topics, finally threw up one particular question, which seemed to please all of the men there: if they could be granted one wish, what would it be? One said he would ask for money; the other, a son-in-law; the third, a new woodworking bench, and on they went in turn around the circle. After they’d all had their say, the only one who hadn’t spoken was the ragged man crouched in the dark corner. Reluctantly and hesitantly, and seeing that they wouldn’t take no for an answer, he responded thus: “I would wish to be a powerful king and to reign over a vast kingdom, and find myself sleeping one night in my palace as the enemy breached our borders, and for those horsemen to appear, before sunrise, at the walls of my castle, and for nobody to offer any resistance, at which point I, having woken in sheer terror and with no time to get dressed, would make my escape in nothing but my nightshirt, and, after being pursued over hill and dale, through woods and valleys, with no sleep or rest, I would arrive unharmed at this very corner in this very room. That would be my wish.” The men looked at each other, confused, and asked him what he would gain from such a wish. To which he replied: “My nightshirt.” And there ended the Hasidic tale, and the Angolans, after a few seconds of bemusement, smiled in gratitude for their neighbor’s strange words of solace.
There is a subtle time shift in the next paragraph, and, after a kind of cinematic dissolve, we move from the expressions of bemused joy on the faces of the Angolans and travel far, far away from that backyard and the dead mare. Thanks to a series of short vignettes, we begin to learn about the various places visited by the ventriloquist on his pilgrimage from the small Portuguese town to the devastated hills of Sana’a, a pilgrimage “in search of the origins of the oral tradition.”
Having first traveled to several locations, always heading east, we follow the narrator as he boards an airplane, which is slow to take off, but eventually leaves the sun-scorched runway and, in almost no time, has risen above the extraordinarily white clouds, beneath which, out of sight, lie the endless sands extending beyond the lovely hills of the ancient kingdom of Saba. . . . The ventriloquist then describes how, as he flies over Arabia Felix — where he expects to land that very night — he realizes that he isn’t, hasn’t been, and never will be an angel. He isn’t, nor will he ever be, because, among other reasons — and here you have to read between the lines, I think — he killed that barber back in Lisbon; but his words also seem to be a kind of veiled reference to something Saul Bellow once said: that from a certain point in the last century, air travel afforded modern writers a possibility that no other writer before them had ever had: that of seeing for themselves that there is no trace of any angels up in the sky, among the clouds, where it has always been said that the angels keep their cloudy quarters.
&
I’m surprised that, a few days ago, I seemed to recall that, toward the end of “The Neighbor,” Walter threw himself into a canal in which there was a kind of whirlpool that went deep down into the Earth’s core, and I recalled how just when it seemed that our man was completely lost in that endless darkness, the whirlpool whisked him back up to the surface again and deposited him in a strange, remote region of the world. . . . I must have read that somewhere else, though, because there is no sign of it at the end of the story, which also happens to be the end of the novel.
Where did this memory spring from? It’s possible that I was mixing it up with something I read in another book. In fact, there is an airplane at the end of Walter’s memoirs, but there’s nothing about a whirlpool whisking him upward, nor any mention of angels. What there is, as I have just remembered, is a scene set on an airplane with a fellow passenger — a man, and something of a know-it-all — who amuses himself telling the story of the family he has just left for good — and he keeps insisting that it is “for good” — in Toronto. At one point, just as an in-flight announcement tells them that they’ll soon be touching down in the land where the oral tradition began, in that long-forgotten land of Arabia,* the man sitting next to Walter tells him that his father, on his death bed in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, told him he’d believed in many things over the course of his life, all of which he’d gradually lost faith in, until he was left with just one absolute conviction: he believed in a fiction that admits to being a fiction, in the knowledge that nothing else exists and that the exquisite truth lies in knowing that it’s a fiction, and yet believing in it all the same.
25
Walking along Calle Londres, I was so immersed in my obsessive thoughts, and finding it hard to breathe in the asphyxiating heat, that I was sure there was no one else on that street, or anywhere else in the city. That’s why it came as a brutal surprise when, out of the blue, another human being addressed me. And “brutal” is the right word, because it was the kind of surprise you get as a child at the age when you haven’t yet come to terms with the existence of other beings who resemble you, but are not you: beings who appear one day, by surprise, when you least expect them and when you’re most convinced of your own individuality.
Underlying what I say is something I’ve never told anyone before, but which I consider to be undeniable: I’ve always had trouble being confronted by the sight of a person similar to me but not me — that is, the same idea contained in another body, someone identical to me and yet different. I’ve always found that very hard, because on those occasions — it still happens to me now — I feel what Gombrowicz described as “a painful splitting in two.” Painful because it t
ransforms me into an unbounded being, whom even I can’t predict; all my possibilities multiplied by that strange new and yet identical force suddenly approaching me, as if I were approaching myself from the outside.
Today I was walking along Calle Londres, and such was my extreme state of introversion, it was almost like having a veil over my eyes, which is why I had to open them very wide and rub them to see who was blocking my path and addressing me so cheerfully. He was a man of about fifty, with very bright eyes, curly fair hair à la Harpo Marx, and very shabby clothes. He was dragging along — as if in a dream — a supermarket cart, laden with all kinds of street detritus, with objects piled one on top of the other to form a tower of junk crowned by a very tall mop, which resembled the flagpole of a newly created union of local beggars.
Pessoa said that some men rule the world and others are the world. The vagabond, who I’ll call Harpo, obviously belonged to the latter group.
“I woke up late with a splitting headache,” he said, as if he’d known me all his life. “Which means I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
I was so surprised by the familiarity with which Harpo spoke to me that I even wondered if I knew him from somewhere, perhaps we’d been fellow partygoers in our youth.
Surprising as his manner was, I was even more amazed that, whereas I found it perfectly normal to be addressed by the voice of the dead person lodged in my head, having this vagabond speak to me in such friendly terms made me feel distinctly on edge. In fact, the truth is, I felt terrified. Because there was no one else on the street, and, since there wasn’t another person for half a mile around to bear witness to whatever might happen there, I couldn’t quite see how to deal with that request for alms, which is what I took it to be, a hand held out asking for charity, although it was also the hand of someone with a hangover and possible ulterior motives.
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