by Luke Brown
‘You see,’ said James, refilling Lizzie’s glass, ‘there hasn’t been an internationally popular Argentine novelist for, well, for ever.’
We were in a café over the road from the language school. I was only half listening as he carried on but it sounded plausible. You had living literary superstars from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Chile (with Bolaño, dead for years, still managing to publish a book a month), and the backpackers’ favourite from Brazil, but no Argentines had really made a sales impact in English since Borges, and he wasn’t a novelist. Cortázar had been lauded, Sabato too, but how many English-speaking readers really knew who they were? What was it these people withheld from English?
Lizzie’s initial anger at being ambushed outside her room had turned to confusion as she made out James swaying behind me in his Cuban-heeled boots, 36-inch-long skinny denims, half-undone shirt and greying hair. I had pleaded passionately then for her to come and sit down and talk to us, to understand I had not meant to deceive her or cause problems with Arturo. My English sounded melodramatic, Argentine. She brushed aside my apology as if it was bad form. She was looking at James curiously, and so I introduced him and let him make his own speech, something about how highly I had praised her, how much he trusted my judgement, how little he now needed to due to the evidence of his own eyes and ears. (Cockburn’s English, I realised, had always sounded Argentine.) He elaborated on the tremendous opportunity available that evening, the chance to speak to a prose-stylist of profound originality, to contribute to a mission which, if successful, would in some small way correct the philistine reading habits of the British reading public. Lizzie looked to me after hearing this, as if I would confirm whether or not it was a joke, and when I simply nodded, neither confirming nor denying, she agreed to have lunch with us and hear James out.
The waiter brought us our food and asked if we would like a second bottle of the Malbec. Of course we would.
‘So what’s this guy’s name?’ she asked.
‘Daniel Requena.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He’s not even published here yet. My friend Javi from Barcelona’s just bought Spanish-language rights. The buzz about him is enormous, though.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘As a person, no one knows. Even Javi hasn’t spoken to him on the phone. I’ll be the first European publisher to meet him face to face.’
This seemed to have less effect on Lizzie than James intended: ‘Look, this is all very appealing and interesting, and I’d be happy to do my best. But I’ve made a promise to have dinner with my boyfriend this evening, and he gets upset enough when I do things without including him.’
‘Oh, well, look,’ said James, sounding slightly deflated. ‘A boyfriend. I guess you can bring him too – why don’t you? I mean, if you want him to come.’
Lizzie pulled out her phone and sent a text. And then my phone rang. This was still a rare enough occurrence for me to spend ten seconds returning other diners’ smug disapproval before I realised the noise came from my own bag. My mum was the only person who rang regularly and, having been used to checking my phone every five minutes in England, where I had friends and purpose, I had accustomed myself to its new silence. But we had left this number alongside James in the places we had searched for Alejandro, and now an Argentine number was calling.
‘Hola, esta Liam,’ I said.
Alejandro’s voice said something long and rolling, and when I could only um and er in response, he switched to English. ‘I see your Spanish has not improved. So, Liam, what is the meaning of this elaborate trail you have left for me? You have realised by now that I do not enjoy remembering my old friend Craig Bennett. I will be very angry if this is a pretence for asking me more of your indelicate questions.’
‘It is not a pre –’
‘Who is this James Cockburn? Is he real? Is that a name, cock-burn? In my society it is the symptom of too pleasurable an evening.’
‘He pretends it’s pronounced Co-burn. He is real. He’s sitting next to me, frowning. He was the-man-whom-we’renot-talking-about’s editor. Would you like to talk to him?
‘In a minute. And have you seen this beautiful young author?’
‘I –’
‘And by the way, I am not such a tart to accept an unusual assignment for the mere sight of a boy with talent, particularly when summoned by a crassly scribbled note on the back of a business card.’
‘I –’
‘I will come anyway. Will you present me with James Burningcock, please?’
I handed him over and James started up. ‘Hel-lo, I’m so glad you called. Liam’s told me all about you.’ He stood and strode outside. He couldn’t conduct a phone conversation except at a brisk walk. I was alone with Lizzie for the first time in weeks.
‘Is he always like this?’ she asked.
‘Only in the company of people.’
She made a wan smile and looked at her plate. There was a sudden shyness to her I hadn’t noticed before.
‘Liam.’ ‘Lizzie.’ We said each other’s names simultaneously.
‘You first,’ I said first.
‘Sarah wrote to me. She said you’d written to apologise to her. She said you wouldn’t be the type to be indiscreet. She said your problem is the opposite, that you think too much about the effects of what you say. She stressed the word say as a direct opposite of do.’
She trailed her finger in a circle in the crumbs of her tostada and looked down into the swirl she’d made.
‘I can’t argue with that but can I tell you –’
‘Shut up,’ she said, looking up. ‘I guess I should accept that if you let Arturo know about the business with Hernán it wasn’t through carelessness.’
‘I didn’t let Arturo know anything. I tried to defend you from Hernán’s attempts to make Arturo jealous. I just pointed out Hernán seemed very keen on you himself.’
‘Which, if Sarah’s right about how deliberately you think things through …’
‘You think I wanted to cause trouble deliberately?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sarah said that?’
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. She said you’re not malicious. Not on purpose.’
‘I don’t think I’m malicious even by accident, even if you can be malicious by accident. I’m straightforward, really. An idiot, yes, but straightforward.’
‘You’re not an idiot. You hide behind that. That’s exactly the sort of self-deprecating non-straightforward statement I expected you would make. So why did you lie to us from the start about you and Sarah still being together?’
‘It wasn’t simple. I hoped it wasn’t over. I didn’t want to help make it over by announcing it to everyone. If I hadn’t skipped over that, we might never have had a chance to be friends, never had a conversation, let alone an honest conversation. But we did talk honestly, didn’t we? I love talking to you. You’re the best person I’ve met here.’
Despite herself, she made a weak smile. ‘You’re not like me. I would have just told you. I would still have been your friend if you’d told me what had happened with Sarah.’
‘No, I’m not like you. But I didn’t know that then.’
She looked at me suspiciously. I was so weary of wearing the wrong costume.
‘Please don’t think I tried to screw you over,’ I said. ‘Why would I try to cause trouble for you and Arturo? What would be my reason? I love Sarah. Can’t you tell? I flew all the way to Brazil for a day just to see her. Please, Lizzie, let’s be friends. We make good friends.’
‘You know traditionally it’s women who cry to manipulate men?’
I rubbed my eyes and looked directly at her. ‘Forgive me,’ I argentined with a hand on my heart, ‘like a man forgiving a manipulative woman.’
People had begun to look over both curiously and approvingly at us. This was a good lunchtime scene. It might not be long before people started to offer us advice.
‘Okay, okay,’ L
izzie sighed, embarrassed, ‘for God’s sake, you’re forgiven.’
I reached out and squeezed her hand. A woman at the next table beamed at me. James came striding back towards us. He sat down and took a swig of wine.
‘Go all right?’ I asked.
He finished his glass. ‘Er, yeah. Friendly enough guy. I tried to tell him we didn’t need him any more now we have the talented Lizzie at our disposal but he wouldn’t listen and kept asking what time, what restaurant. Apparently, the food’s magnificent, extremely expensive, and he will see us there at nine-thirty.’
‘Great, my boyfriend’s looking forward to it too,’ said Lizzie, looking at her phone.
‘I intend to bring no one but myself,’ I declared.
‘Good,’ said James, looking ruffled.
Lizzie had classes after lunch so, at four o’clock, I was left on my own with James.
‘You probably need a sleep?’ I ventured.
‘Very kind of you to concern yourself, Liam, but I’m not going to desert you so soon after our reunion. How about we try your mate’s bar?’
So it was that, after five hours in Achtung!, we made our way to one of the finest restaurants in Latin America without the slightest hope of eating there. We had recently done another large line of cocaine to ‘sober us up’ and when that had not made us sober we had smoked some luminous skunk with Aleman to ‘tone down our chat’. These cures had pasted us to the back seat of a speeding taxi.
We looked at each other warily. ‘We shouldn’t really have done that to ourselves,’ said James. ‘Are we really in Argentina?’
‘Probably not,’ I replied.
The streets pulsed past like the beginning of a cinematic car chase. By the time the film had finished I hoped I might be able to speak properly again. The ride proceeded for a few moments in silence.
‘Are you ready to offer your theories to the table about the lack of internationally famous Argentine novelists?’ I asked James. It was a sentence that had taken me no more than six minutes to prepare.
‘Oh, God.’
‘And what you propose to do to change this?’
‘Oh, God,’ he said and scrambled to wind down the window and poke his head out. He held it there for five seconds while the driver addressed me with a stream of animated Spanish, then pulled it back in. ‘That helped a bit,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Optimism, Liam, optimism.’
When we pulled up, the taxi driver asked for a fare three or four times the going rate. James surprised him by doubling it and politely asking for a recibo. There was not a language in the world in which he did not know the word for a receipt.
We were standing outside a restaurant with windows that glowed with intense white light and made me think unpleasantly of an operating theatre. Lizzie and Arturo were standing in its doorway, lit up like angels taking a fag break. They looked at us and laughed.
‘There are two of you!’ Arturo called, coming forward to hug and kiss me. ‘This will be fun!’
Over the last few weeks I had not thought much about our kiss in the alleyway. It belonged to a me I didn’t really believe in. But seeing him there, black jeans, shirt and jacket, brown skin and dark hair, smarter than I’d ever seen him, autumn-eyed, clean-shaven, smirking with our shared secret – I had to turn away quickly to Lizzie.
Which did not reduce my desire. I wanted them both.
Chapter 18
Daniel Requena was (still is) a woman.
As I entered the restaurant, I staggered at the sight of the severed heads of mythical beasts that lined the walls. Recovering, I concentrated on walking in a straight line and maintaining the calm facial expression of a reformed criminal. James, always more ambitious, accelerated towards a corner table where Allen Ginsberg circa 1947 was sitting with a woman friend beneath a unicorn’s head.
‘Hola, soy James Cockburn!’ James bellowed: the words we had practised earlier. The young man in horn-rimmed spectacles flinched. Some peas, or substance made wittily into the shape of peas, fled from his plate. I watched the peas-or-not-to-peas roll to the floor in slow motion. James shouted even louder: ‘Encantado! ¿Eres Daniel Requena, no?’
‘No!’ said wide-eyed Ginsberg and his startled girlfriend. The maître d’ strode towards James as if he was about to rugby tackle him. Two tables along, a young woman began to laugh and stood up.
‘James Cockburn! Encantada! Soy Dani Requena.’
As if his mistake had never happened, James strode towards her and bent to kiss her on each cheek. It was quite a bend because she was tiny, nearly two feet smaller than him, and he narrowly avoided headbutting her. She was maybe my age, with straight brown hair falling around her narrow shoulders and a slim face with neat features that made me think of girls from the home counties. She looked like a writer, or rather, she looked like a writing instrument, like a freshly sharpened pencil.
James gamely introduced Lizzie with the words she’d taught him earlier, ‘Mi amiga y la intérprete’, before Lizzie took over in fluid Spanish and made her laugh immediately. I presumed they were laughing at James and me. After they’d embraced, Lizzie introduced Arturo, who had been waiting behind her, looking sideways at Dani through his fringe. Dani spent a couple of seconds taking him in before giving him the standard kiss hello. I was left to introduce myself. I gave her my name and when she continued to look at me expectantly I reached for words to describe my role that I didn’t even possess in English. I settled on, ‘Soy un editor muerto.’
She raised her eyebrows, looked round at all of us, amused, and spoke to Lizzie.
Arturo translated before Lizzie had the chance. ‘She says we need a bigger table.’ The maître d’ had been hovering, trying to size up which of these strange characters to deal with first. Arturo spoke to him immediately, and it seconds he was arguing and laughing with him. His personality was quicker and brighter in his own language, inaccessible to me. I could tell Lizzie was annoyed at being usurped in her role by Arturo. She made an attempt to join in the conversation with the maître d’ but he continued to talk to Arturo and ignore her until we were led to a larger table at the back of the restaurant.
James took one head of the table and invited Dani and Lizzie to sit either side of him. Arturo chose to sit on the other side of Dani rather than next to Lizzie, leaving me to sit next to her, facing Arturo.
I began to think we might pull this off. The sudden change of company had shocked me from my introspection, and James’ incredible self-belief was bulldozing its way through any of his own residual paranoia.
‘Supones soy el hombre,’ Dani said to James and he caught the meaning before Lizzie could translate.
‘Si, I admit it,’ he said. ‘Everyone kept calling you the new Bolaño, not the female Bolaño. And the pages I’ve read seemed so … precise and cold and spare.’
Lizzie, looking grumpy, finally got to do some interpreting, though when I looked at Dani tilting her tiny chin up at James I had the feeling she had understood each of his words.
‘Do you think only men are precise and cold and spare?’ Lizzie asked James.
James and I looked at each other. We were the precise opposites: scattershot, febrile and superfluous.
‘No, of course,’ apologised James. ‘There’s probably no such thing as male or female style. But there is such a thing as male or female nombres and Daniel Requena is to me a male nombre.’
‘Like George Eliot,’ I suggested, glad to have something to contribute.
‘No, not like that,’ said Dani in English and then she spoke some rapid Spanish we could tell was politely refuting our suggestions. Already it seemed the Englishmen abroad were destined to play the idiots in this exchange.
‘One,’ translated Lizzie, ‘it is not like that really, because Dani or even Daniel Requena is my real name, short for Daniela Requena, so I have not misled you; rather, you have misled yourselves. Two,’ she paused dramatically, ‘flattery will get you everywhere.’
/> We all laughed and Dani smiled at us tolerantly. She seemed to have some sympathy for comic characters, if that’s what we were. It was a change from the role of the villain I had been getting used to. So I sat quietly and did my best to sober up. Sin, guilt and repentance: it was some sort of structure for a life. Instead of disappearing to the toilet, I watched James, Lizzie and Arturo fight for Dani’s attention. Alejandro had not arrived and I felt like an interloper at a double-date. Whenever Arturo succeeded in distracting Dani from James, Lizzie and James took their revenge by flirting heartily with each other until Arturo was forced to bring them back into the conversation and revert to English. The spotlights shining on the mounted unicorn heads above us made them glow white as bone. I stared at them until eventually, exhausted, I slipped out for a cigarette on my own.
Dani arrived, just as I was stubbing mine out. ‘Hello,’ she said, pulling a cigarette out of her bag.
‘Señorita,’ I said. My anxiousness at speaking Spanish often led to this type of Tourette’s.
She giggled.
‘I mean, hello,’ I said, smiling back. ‘Hablo solo un poquito Castellano.’
‘Tengo una confesion.’
‘¿Una? Tengo muchas confesiones.’
‘Your accent is cute,’ she said. ‘I appreciate the effort.’
‘Well, it certainly is effortful. Thank you.’ For a moment I felt very proud of how my Spanish was progressing until I realised we had switched to English.
‘Well, of course, I speak English,’ she said.
‘Yes, I can see that now. Is that your confesion?’
‘I do not realise how good I can speak English until I hear your Spanish.’
‘Gracias. I’m glad I came in useful for something. So, why go through all that interpreting?’
‘Oh, I thought it might be interesting. To have distance. I was not sure I wanted to meet James. Being private is working well for me. I didn’t want to ruin things.’
She’d understood perfectly how to intrigue a publisher like Cockburn. Agents are so keen to tell you about their authors’ physical blessings, their advantageous networks and starring roles in incredible personal melodramas, that to be refused any information at all is suspense of the highest order. James was not such a sophisticated reader as to refuse the pleasure of seeking the great revelation, and I could see how he was now delighted with the current twist. The story of his meeting with her in itself was valuable for him even if he failed to buy the rights to her book.
