Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  “You want to take notes of us arguing?” she asked shrilly.

  There followed a Martian tsunami.

  46

  35 is 53 backward, which made me think of The Charterhouse of Parma and the tiny number of days it took Stendhal to write his mighty novel. Thirty-five was also the age reached by Albert, the baker on the corner of Torroella, who died today. He didn’t die because of the heat wave in the middle of the hottest summer recorded in Barcelona in more than a hundred years. What killed him was a night out on the town, one of those wild nights out that some people still indulge in: a stupid accident in the early hours, when he was on his way home; one G&T too many as he left the Imperatriz, the most dismal bar in Coyote.

  I thought about the fragility of the strange and ultimately improbable air surrounding us and which we never think of as being made for us, and also about our intuitive sense of exile, of rootlessness, all those things that make us long to go home, as if that were still possible. Wallace Stevens, lawyer and poet, put it much better: “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place/That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves/And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”

  Familiar faces from the neighborhood that, suddenly, I don’t see anymore, nor do I even notice their absence, until, one day, months later, they resurface in my mind and I wonder what could have become of them, and feel sad to realize that the unavoidable has happened. They weren’t even friends or even acquaintances, and yet, without my being aware of it, they were perhaps the very symbol of life.

  Constant daily disappearances. The whole neighborhood is full of people who are here one day and gone the next. “What has become of those people who, just because I saw them day after day, became part of my life? Tomorrow I, too, will disappear from Rua da Prata, Rua dos Douradores, Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I, too, will be someone who no longer walks these streets. . . .” (Fernando Pessoa).

  I realize that in the height of this Barcelona summer — which is now officially the hottest on record, and which some are erroneously calling an Indian summer — all my thoughts are cold.

  47

  The Neighbor

  This morning: an intense writing session in my study. I set about describing a fleeting visit, incognito, to the city of Lisbon. A pause or stop en route to that small town near Évora, where, in some bar or other, I would probably overhear a group of customers engaged in a whispered conversation, a semisecret confab that I imagined would be about a young Jew and a dead horse. The description of that first phase of the journey, the Lisbon phase, took me ages, only to conclude that it had been a complete waste of time and that what I’d written was utter garbage and I would have to repeat the whole thing, which is why I decided to go for a walk and take a good long breather.

  My head was pounding like a drum, as they say, and inside that drum were all kinds of shadows and labyrinths, as befitted my guise as Walter fleeing in his nightshirt. Indeed, so deeply immersed was I in that escape, that I realized all it would take for me to become Walter would be for someone to treat me as if I really were him, which is exactly how I felt when I bumped into Sánchez in La Súbita, and he treated me just as if I were one of his pathetic characters.

  I again had the impression that my neighbor was extremely vain. But why? Because of a certain popularity gained from his appearances on television? Because he had flirted with the idea of erasing himself from the map like Robert Walser when, in fact, Walser fell quiet because he followed certain complicated Swiss paths, and, above all, because he vanished into the interstices of his “micrograms,” whereas Sánchez chose to do so by ostentatiously receiving prizes and other such vulgarities?

  I realize that I’m talking as if I were his worst enemy. I obviously feel deeply humiliated by his treatment of me.

  There came a point when I could stand it no longer, and I asked him about his character, Walter, about whether he’d named him after Robert Walser or after Walter Benjamin. Even though I assumed the name was probably a reference to some ventriloquist he’d known in the distant past, he didn’t have to think very long before answering.

  “No,” he said with a broad smile, “I named him after Walter Marciano de Queirós, a Brazilian forward who played for Valencia and died very young in a car accident. When I was a boy, his face was the only one missing from my album of cigarette cards.”

  I would have laughed along with him if I hadn’t felt that even the way he looked at me was somehow scornful, as if I were a slightly inferior being, perhaps because I never presume to be “someone” and I take pleasure in being restrained and humble, keeping strictly to what I’ve been learning about modest knowledge. This may have confused him and made him think I’m just a poor schmuck who used to be a lawyer and who is now a complete nobody.

  “By the way,” he said, “I’ve been told that some guy is passing himself off as my nephew and that you know him. How come?”

  “How come what? How come I know him?”

  “No, how come someone is claiming to be my nephew.”

  I realized then that, while I might have thought I knew Sánchez really well, he was, in fact, a complete stranger, and that my mistaken impression was due perhaps to having spent all those days steeped in the world of that early novel of his. He was looking at me with such a superior air that my natural reaction was to tell him that the bogus nephew had told me he’d spent weeks now rewriting Walter’s Problem.

  The look he gave me was unforgettable, a mixture of shock and horror.

  “Did I hear you right?” he said.

  “Yes, apparently he’s brought the whole plot right up to date, and there’s one story in particular that he’s really improved, the one called ‘Carmen.’ At least that’s what he told me the last time I saw him. According to him, his version of the novel will be a vast improvement on Walter’s memoirs.”

  “Not so fast,” he said. “Could you repeat what you just said?”

  “Oh, it was nothing, just that the relationship between repetition and literature is the central theme of your nephew’s work.”

  “Hardly surprising given that he’s writing a repeat of my book.”

  And he laughed. He almost split his sides, as people used to say.

  He seemed so blithe and pleased with himself that I decided to rain on his parade.

  “Your nephew is determined to show that no novel is ever complete, that no text can ever be considered to be finished.”

  “But he isn’t my nephew. And that’s just for starters,” he said, looking me up and down, doubtless thinking exactly what I was thinking about him: you never really know your neighbor.

  I explained that his bogus nephew believed that the history of literature was a kind of succession of works, a sequence of short-story collections, for example, that never stop in one place, which means that they’re all susceptible to being given another turn of the screw.

  Sánchez again roared with laughter, apparently having the time of his life. “I had no idea,” he said, “that you spoke in such a weird way.” I felt offended, but pretended not to care. I could have asked him if it was my discretion and humility that made him take me for a fool, but preferred to pretend that I hadn’t even noticed his barely concealed contempt, although I did try to get a dig in somewhere.

  “Your nephew wants revenge for something or other,” I said. “The first time I saw him, I thought he was a clochard, then it seemed to me he was an intelligent clochard; eventually, though, I worked out that he was just a shady individual consumed with envy, that his real name is Pedro, and he works for another Pedro, the local tailor. Do you know him?”

  “Who?”

  “The tailor.”

  “Is there a local tailor?”

  I told him that this chirpy little needleworker was paying the false nephew a lot of money on the pretext of having him create a free version of Walter’s memoirs, his real aim being to get h
im to make radical changes to the story entitled “Carmen,” which was the only story the tailor really cared about.

  “And what has that got to do with me?” asked Sánchez, again smiling broadly.

  “It seems he wants to avenge himself, through your nephew, for the affair you once had with the real Carmen.”

  Even that didn’t wipe the smile off his face. On the contrary, he laughed even louder.

  “So the tailor is her lover?” he concluded.

  Whether intentionally or not, this question made me see myself as I really was: a duped husband. What’s more, I’d brought it on myself. There I was thinking I was being so clever, when really I’d landed myself in another fine mess.

  The most unbearable part was that Sánchez was still greatly tickled, as if some detail that completely escaped me were provoking his endless, uncontrollable laughter.

  I was, though, obliged to answer his question. If I told him the tailor wasn’t Carmen’s lover, then I would be what I am: a cuckold. And if I told him he was, the result would be the same.

  “Oh, and another thing your bogus nephew said,” I told him bluntly, “he said that whenever he rereads one of the chapters about your Walter’s adventures, he feels like digging you up and beating you on the skull with your own tibia.”

  He found this vastly amusing too, and I felt an urgent need then to walk away and leave him standing there.

  “If I ever meet him, I’ll kill him,” Sánchez said suddenly, his smile suddenly replaced by a very grim expression indeed.

  I felt afraid.

  “I’ll kill him,” he repeated.

  That’s when I considered going away, beginning my “escape in a nightshirt” right there and then. Leaving my home Petronius-style, with just a small leather satchel. Telling Carmen one last time that I was going downstairs to buy some cigarettes at Bar Tender and not coming back. Or else paying modest homage to the legendary suicide of Coyote’s hero, José Mallorquí, the previous tenant of Sánchez’s apartment, who left behind this simple note: “I can’t go on. I’m going to kill myself. There are signed checks in the drawer in my desk. Papa.”

  But I’ve always had my doubts about suicide, because, whenever I think of it, I can’t help remembering that the man who kicks away the chair he is standing on takes the leap into the void only to feel that the rope around his neck binds him ever closer to the very existence he wanted to leave.

  “So, if I’ve understood you correctly,” Sánchez said, interrupting my thoughts, “I now have two men who hate me, both called Pedro.”

  “Yes.”

  I was about to add:

  “Two enemies, the rope and the void.”

  Instead I said something very different, about how certain stories appear in our lives and how the path they follow ends up merging with our own.

  Another guffaw. A huge guffaw. It was almost painful to see how much he reveled in what I’d just said. Perhaps the most irritating thing of all was this: he was convinced that his “bogus nephew” was bogus and didn’t exist.

  48

  Dusk was coming on, and, in the time it took me to walk down Rua do Sol, night fell as suddenly as it does in the tropics. But I wasn’t in the tropics and one thing was certain: I was walking along, wide awake and alert to the dangers of that street; I was walking along thinking about myself — about my fate, to be exact — and I avoided smiling at all costs because whenever I smiled, I looked sad. I didn’t want to give myself away to the other passersby. Then I realized that the harlequin’s mask was covering my face. How could I have forgotten that? I looked like someone on his way to a fancy-dress party, and so my fears could not have been more absurd. Who could possibly recognize me? Who could possibly know of my sadness, still less my crimes? I was walking with a cane that I didn’t actually need, but which was part of my camouflage. I was limping to give credibility to my role as an anonymous man going to a party in a small town somewhere south of Lisbon. I was shuffling down the cobbled street when, through an open window, I heard a Beatles song being sung in Portuguese by a young woman with a delicate voice. The song repeated these words several times: “Now I need a place to hide away.”

  &

  A thought: do kids today still read Marco Polo?

  49

  Here in this village near Évora, where the hours pass in a slow but lively fashion, I think only about life. There’s hardly anything in my room, and almost nothing in the village; some of the furniture stands out starkly against the whitewashed walls, and outside, the red earth is covered in a vast blanket of dry stubble. From here I can see an agricultural civilization, with people wearing pants and full skirts that seem to come from another age. They’ve already harvested the wheat and have nothing to do. Nor have I.

  Setting off with just this notebook, without my computer, should have made me feel lighter, but, oddly, what I miss more and more is the patient editing on paper that I used to do at home, before writing it all out again, transferring it onto the computer, printing it out, rereading it, making more changes on paper and then on screen, at which stage, I would feel like a pianist seated at the piano, faithful to the score, but free now to interpret it.

  Each day I took greater and greater pleasure in repetition, a pleasure closely bound up with my diary, which, from the very start, has taken repetition as its theme. Contrary to expectations, I soon realized that, for this new stage, traveling light has its disadvantages, because now all I do is yearn for that perfectionist system I’d instituted at home, the system of repeating over and over that particular day’s words, to the point where I became an obsessive stalker of what I’d already written, and which I always believed could be improved. Now I see that, in Barcelona, when I repeated the words over and over, what I was seeking was physical and mental exhaustion. In Barcelona, I was beginning to resemble the painter with the big bushy beard who my grandfather used to invite to spend the summers at our family’s vacation home in the country when I was a child. Over a period of three or four years, he painted the same tree more than one hundred times, perhaps because — as happened with me and my writing — he understood the appeal of constantly interrogating what he had already put down on paper.

  &

  As evening fell, I went to the village bar, fearing that not showing my face might arouse suspicions. The police would doubtless already be looking for me in Lisbon. As I crossed the square, I passed someone I took to be the local tailor; he had the air of a tailor who has just shut up shop and still has a few pins stuck somewhere on his clothing. Bowed head, melancholy, languorous. I wondered again what it is about the “repairers” of this world — as I would like to call them — who are always so taciturn; what a difference between their world and that of barbers, who take such an interest in life, an interest very hard to find in the sad world of tailors.

  In the village bar, I couldn’t quite catch what the customers were talking about, because they were speaking very softly, as they were in the final story in my neighbor’s novel. Perhaps they were discussing the story of the dead horse and the young Jew. I was afraid someone might suddenly ask me for a light and ask if I was the ventriloquist they were looking for in Lisbon. Just then a woman came into the bar. She had broad hips and strangely tapered limbs, and was so terribly pale that, as she tottered up to the bar, she reminded me of nothing so much as a very reluctant ghost. I, for my part, was so dreadfully somber that I could have been mistaken for someone in a skeleton costume. This scene was a million miles from the beggars and other conspirators in my old Coyote neighborhood. In reality, everything was a million miles away, because mine was a journey with no return, a kind of one-way ticket to Mars.

  I finished my glass of wine and, as I was about to leave the bar, I heard the woman asking another customer for a light, and she did so in a low voice and in a staccato language that sounded like Arabic. Things were clearly becoming far too complicated, and I reminded myself
that it was time to continue on my way. I lingered for a few seconds longer, however, drawing little circles in the dark with my lit cigarette. And I recalled other times, when the profoundest idea in the world would suddenly pop into my head only to be lost, to vanish inside my brain, long before I could find something with which to write it down.

  50

  When I woke, I had the sense that I’d shifted into a kind of earthly writing, although I don’t know why my friends in the dream called it earthly, presumably because, having been left with no study and no books to refer to, I’d sat down on the ground, alone with this notebook, just as I am right now: in this case, sitting on the beach in Algeciras, traveling, or, rather, fleeing to Morocco.

  Writing at ground level, and, with each second that passes, feeling a joy that seems to be returning me to that pure substance of self, namely, a past impression, pure life preserved in its pure state (and which, as Proust says, we can only know in that preserved state, because, at the moment we actually experience it, it is too clouded by other sensations to be apparent), a past impression, an extraordinary return to the pure substance of self, to something that concerns only you, that is completely yours, and which, suddenly, more than half a century later, you recover: it’s to do with a notebook, with the ground on which you are sitting, with a particular age — I would have been five years old on that day, in my maternal grandmother’s house, the first time I formed letters into words in my drawing book, the first time in my entire life that I wrote a story, my first contact with a written narrative, and, of course, with no study, no computer, no book to call my own.

  A return to myself. I thought about tourists, and about all those friends who travel to see the thing they’ve always dreamed of seeing: the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, the Great Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo, the seven hills of Rome, the Mona Lisa in Paris, the chair in Bar Melitón in Cadaqués where Duchamp would sit to play chess, the Musetta Caffé in the Palermo district in Buenos Aires. . . . One day, a friend suggested that it was actually better to discover all that hasn’t already been seen, all that you weren’t expecting to see, which, he said, was probably neither grand nor impressive nor alien, but was, on the contrary, the familiar regained.