‘What do you want me to say?’ said Mario, handing the paper back to Scanlan and feeling a slight tingle of satisfaction in his stomach. ‘Ask Berkowickz.’
‘Who?’ asked Scanlan, wrinkling his brow slightly.
‘Berkowickz,’ Mario repeated. ‘He’s in charge of those two sections.’
‘Have you gone crazy, or what?’ bellowed Scanlan, beside himself, standing up and pounding on the desk. ‘Who the hell is Berkowickz, might I ask?’
Confused, not knowing what to answer, almost asking, Mario declared, ‘The new phonology professor.’
Scanlan stared at him incredulously.
‘Look, Mario,’ he said at last, containing the rage that was making his hands tremble, ‘I assure you that I can understand your attempts to shift the responsibility to someone else: it’s petty, but I can understand it. What I can’t get through my head is you taking me for an idiot. You really think I am, or what?’ He paused, took a deep breath, pointed at the door with an admonishing finger and added, ‘And now listen closely: if you don’t get out of my office this instant and go and teach those two classes, or if I receive one single further complaint about you, I swear I’ll tear up your contract right here and now and throw you out on the street. I hope I’ve made myself clear.’
Mario stood up and left the office. Scanlan stood staring at the door, visibly shaken. Then he sat down, stroked his beard gently, looked at the papers he had on his desk, signed a few of them. After a few minutes he raised his eyes and blinked. ‘Berkowickz,’ he murmured, staring off into space, abstracted. ‘Berkowickz.’
XX
Mario walked quickly down the corridor, without saying hello to anybody. He got to the office; with trembling hands he took out a bunch of keys, chose one, tried to open the door but couldn’t. He tried to stay calm; he looked for the key engraved with the number 4024, which corresponded to the number of the office, in vain: the key did not appear. He immediately noticed the door opening from within. Olalde’s hunchbacked silhouette stood out against the insufficient light of the office; he smiled with a grimace that ploughed his forehead with lines and allowed a glimpse of his nicotine-stained teeth.
‘This time you were lucky, young man,’ he said, still sneering. ‘But watch out: next time you might not be.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mario said hastily, without thinking what he was saying, almost in fear.
‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,’ said Olalde. ‘But that’s your problem: you’re old enough to know what suits you. At least you’ll have realized that sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’
Mario didn’t say anything; he walked back up the corridor. When he passed in front of Berkowickz’s office he stopped, scanned the corridor left and right, examined the bunch of keys, found the one engraved with the number 4043. He opened the door: he recognized the open books squashed on the desk and the shelves, the portable fridge, the cardboard boxes crammed with papers, the dirty ashtrays, the general disorder and closed-up smell; he understood that all his things were there.
He gave three lectures.
When he got home he dialled a telephone number.
‘Mrs Workman?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is Mario Rota,’ said Mario. ‘I’m calling about a delicate situation.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s about the new tenant.’
‘The new tenant,’ Mrs Workman repeated with a tired voice.
‘Mr Berkowickz, I mean.’
‘Mr Who?’
‘Berkowickz,’ repeated Mario. ‘Daniel Berkowickz. The linguistics professor, my colleague, the tenant who moved into Nancy’s old apartment.’
There was a silence.
‘I’m going to be frank with you, Mr Rota. I hope you won’t take it the wrong way,’ Mrs Workman said at last. ‘You know better than anyone that when Nancy spoke to me about your . . . eccentricities, shall we call them, I chose to be tolerant. She acted like a good tenant should, and I’m not going to consent to you bothering her, not her or any of the rest of the tenants, as you certainly did me the other day calling me at an unreasonable hour, probably drunk.’
‘Mrs Workman –’
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Mrs Workman interrupted him. ‘You were lucky I was half asleep and don’t really remember what you said. Or I probably don’t want to remember. Anyway, let me tell you something: I accept that you and Nancy don’t get along, you’ve had problems, but although I don’t blame you entirely, Nancy has been a tenant here longer than any other and has more right than you to stay here; furthermore, she’s never given me any reason to worry. I’d rather my tenants got along, but I assure you if I have one single further complaint about you or you start behaving strangely again I won’t have the slightest reservation about throwing you out.’
‘But Mrs Workman,’ Mario complained weakly. ‘It was you yourself who introduced me to Mr Berkowickz and –’
‘Look, Mr Rota,’ said Mrs Workman in a final-sounding tone of voice. ‘Stop talking nonsense. I don’t know who Mr Berkowickz is, nor do I care. I don’t want to discuss the matter further; it’s all been said. But I repeat for the last time: I hope I don’t have another complaint about you. And my advice to you is to give up drinking.’
Mrs Workman hung up. She went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, looked in the mirror, put a bit of colour on her cheeks and lips, brushed her hair, then she dabbed a bit of perfume behind each earlobe. She returned to the room and picked up a beige handbag and a linen jacket that she put on in the kitchen as she took a last look around the house.
She drove out of the garage and took Ellis Avenue up to Green. At the intersection she stopped at the traffic lights. Then, as she waited abstractedly for the lights to change, she murmured, ‘Berkowickz.’
XXI
Sitting on the sofa in the dining room, Mario lit a cigarette; he inhaled the smoke contentedly. Then he dialled a telephone number.
‘Ginger?’ he said when a feminine voice answered. ‘It’s Mario.’
‘How are you, Mario?’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger hasn’t come home yet. Do you want me to give her a message?’
Mario hesitated, then he said, ‘Tell her I called and that . . .’
‘Oh, you’re in luck,’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger’s just coming in. I’ll put her on, Mario. See you.’
Mario heard an indistinct murmur down the line.
‘Mario?’ said Ginger a moment later. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ said Mario. ‘I was just wondering if you were doing anything this evening.’
‘Nothing special,’ said Ginger. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mario. ‘I thought you might like to come over here for a bite to eat.’
‘Sounds like a great idea,’ said Ginger. ‘What time do you want me to come over?’
‘Whenever suits you,’ said Mario. ‘Right now, if you want.’
‘I’ll be right over,’ said Ginger. And hung up.
Mario took a last puff of his cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. He looked at all the books and papers in a disorderly pile on the arm of the sofa; he thought about sorting them out, taking them through to the study to fill the time till Ginger arrived.
Then he got an idea. He stood up and stealthily opened the apartment door; he crossed the landing. Pressing his ear to the door opposite, he held his breath, listened in silence.
‘I’ve had it up to here with you, you Italian pig!’ he heard thundering behind his back. ‘Up to here!’
Weighed down with shopping, Nancy dragged the mass of her body up the stairs laboriously. Mario held out his hands, apologized clumsily while retreating into his apartment, then offered to help Nancy with her bags.
‘You little turd,’ answered Nancy, dropping her packages on the floor. She breathed heavily as she hunted around in a pocket of her very ample dress that in vain sought to sow confusion with respect to the true dimensio
ns of what it hid. She took out a bunch of keys, adding, ‘That’s far enough, you Italian swine. I’m phoning the old lady right now.’
‘No, Nancy, please,’ begged Mario, stepping towards her, his arms outstretched in an almost imploring manner. ‘Not Mrs Workman.’
Nancy had opened the door. She turned to confront Mario: he noticed the drops of sweat pearling on the woman’s brow.
‘But what the fuck were you doing there?’
‘The new tenant,’ Mario mumbled. ‘I just wanted to see if Berkowickz . . . was . . . um.’
Mario smiled without finishing his sentence. Nancy regarded him with resignation, almost with pity.
‘You’re not just a pig,’ she diagnosed, shaking her head gently from left to right. ‘You’re also going crazy.’
Nancy slammed the door. Mario returned to his apartment, closing the door softly.
After a short time Ginger arrived. She was wearing a blue sweater with red buttons, a black miniskirt and slightly worn black shoes; her eyes shone. Mario thought: She looks lovely. They sat down on the sofa in the dining room. Mario offered a whisky. Ginger accepted. Mario poured whisky over ice in two glasses in the kitchen and went back into the dining room.
They talked animatedly, laughing and drinking.
‘I’m pleased,’ said Ginger at one point, after a silence, looking at Mario with serious, blue, love-struck eyes.
‘What about?’ asked Mario, sipping his whisky.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ginger. She smiled weakly. She added, ‘You’ve been so strange this week.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Mario.
There was a silence.
‘I thought we were through,’ declared Ginger after a while.
‘Me too,’ said Mario.
He set his glass of whisky down on the floor, he moved closer to her, put his arm around her neck, stroked the nape of her neck and her hair, kissed her softly on the lips. Lengthening the kiss they slid over to rest against the right arm of the sofa, and laughed as they heard the books and papers heaped there fall on to the floor: an Italian–German dictionary, outlines for lectures, notes, a phonology manual and a photocopied article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz.
The Motive
Il y a une locution latine qui dit à peu près: ‘Ramasser un dénier dans l’ordure avec ses dents’. On appliquait cette figure de rhétorique aux avares, je suis comme eux, je ne m’arrête à rien pour trouver de l’or.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
I
Álvaro took his work seriously. Every day he got up punctually at eight. He cleared his head with a cold shower and went down to the supermarket to buy bread and the newspaper. When he returned he made coffee and toast with butter and marmalade and ate breakfast in the kitchen, leafing through the paper and listening to the radio. By nine he was sitting in his study ready to begin the day’s work.
He’d made his life subordinate to literature: all friendships, interests, ambitions, possibilities for professional or economic advancement, days or evenings out had been displaced in its interest. He disdained anything he didn’t consider an impetus to his work. And, since the majority of well-paid jobs he could have had with his law degree demanded almost exclusive dedication, Álvaro preferred a modest position as consultant in a modest legal agency. This job allowed him to have the whole morning at his disposal to devote to his labours and freed him from any responsibility that might distract him from writing; it also gave him indispensable economic peace of mind.
He considered literature an exclusive lover. She must either be served with dedication and devotion or she would abandon him to his fate. Tertium non datur. As with all arts, literature is a matter of time and toil, he’d say to himself. Remembering a severe French moralist’s celebrated maxim on love, Álvaro thought it was with inspiration as it was with ghosts: everyone talked about it, but no one had seen it. And so he accepted that all creation consisted of one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. The reverse would mean leaving it in the hands of the amateur, the weekend writer; the reverse would mean improvisation, chaos and the most despicable lack of rigour.
He felt that literature had been left to amateurs. Conclusive proof: only the least eminent of his contemporaries devoted themselves to it. Frivolity, the absence of any authentic ambition, traditionally conformist commerce, indiscriminate use of obsolete formulas, myopia and even disdain for anything that diverged from the tracks of narrow provincialism ran rampant. Phenomena alien to actual creation added confusion to this panorama: the lack of stimulating and civilized social surroundings, of an environment suitable for work and fertile in truly artistic expression; even the petty social climbing, the advantage taken of cultural promotion as an access ramp to certain political positions . . . Álvaro felt partly responsible for such a state of affairs. For that reason he must conceive an ambitious work of universal reach that would spur his colleagues on to continue the labour embarked upon by him.
He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a great reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamental works of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This – he later observed – did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.
Strictly speaking, literature is oblivion encouraged by vanity. This verification did not humble, but ennobled it. It was essential – Álvaro reflected during his long years of meditation and study prior to the conception of the Work – to find in the literature of our predecessors a seam that expresses us fully, a cypher of our very selves, our most intimate desires, our most abject reality. It was essential to retake that tradition and insert oneself into it, even if it had to be rescued from oblivion, marginalization or the studious hands of dusty scholars. It was essential to create a solid genealogy. It was essential to have fathers.
He considered various options. For a time, he thought that verse was by definition superior to prose. The lyric poem, however, struck him as too scattered in its execution, too instinctive and gusty. As much as he was repelled by the idea, he sensed that phenomena verging on magic, and therefore removed from the sweet control of a tenacious apprenticeship, and given to arising in spirits more festive than his own, clouded the act of creation. If what the classics romantically called inspiration was involved in any genre, it was the lyric poem. So, since he knew himself incapable of bringing one off, he decided to consider it obsolete: the lyric poem is an anachronism, he decreed.
Later he weighed up the possibility of writing an epic poem. Here undoubtedly the intervention of momentary rapture was reduced to the order of the anecdotal. And there was no shortage of texts on which to base his claim. But the use of verse involved an inevitable distancing from the audience. The work would remain confined to the sphere of a secret circle, and he thought it advisable to avoid the temptation of enclosing oneself in a conception of literature as a code only suitable for initiates. A text is the author’s dialogue with the world and, if one of the two interlocutors disappears, the process is irredeemably mutilated: the text loses its effectiveness.
He opted to attempt an epic in prose. But perhaps the novel – he said to himself – was born in exactly this way: as an epic in prose. And thi
s put him on the trail of a new urgency: the necessity to elevate prose to the dignity of poetry. Each sentence must possess the marmoreal immutability of verse, its music, its secret harmony, its fatality. He scorned the superiority of poetry over prose.
He decided to write a novel. The novel was born with modernity; it was the instrument most suited to expressing it. But could one still write novels? His century had seen its foundations undermined by determined spade-work; the most esteemed novelists had set out to ensure that no one would succeed them, had set out to pulverize the genre. Before this death sentence, there were two appeals successive in time and equally apparent: one, in spite of trying to preserve the greatness of the genre, was negative and basically complied with the sentence; the other, which did nothing to challenge the verdict either, was positive, but willingly confined itself to a modest horizon. The first agonized in a super-literary experimentalism, asphyxiating and verbosely self-devouring; the second – intimately convinced, like the other, of the death of the novel – took cover, like a lover who sees his faith betrayed, in lesser genres like the short story or the novella, and with these meagre substitutes renounced all intention of grasping human life and reality in an allencompassing totality. An art encumbered from the outset by the burden of its lowly lack of ambition was an art condemned to die of frivolity.
Despite all the century’s swipes, however, it was essential to keep believing in the novel. Some had already understood this. No instrument could grasp with more precision and wealth of nuance the long-winded complexity of reality. As for its death certificate, he considered it a dangerous Hegelian prejudice; art neither advances nor retreats: art happens. But it was only possible to combat the notion of the genre’s death throes by returning to its moment of splendour, in the meantime taking careful note of the technical and other sorts of contributions the century had afforded, which it would be, at the very least, stupid to waste. It was essential to go back to the nineteenth century; it was essential to go back to Flaubert.
The Tenant and The Motive Page 8
