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by Margaret Jull Costa;Annella McDermott

  Since I read no newspapers and had only transient contacts with other wretched tramps, I did not find out for a long time that Villa Nemo had been destroyed by a fire in which the baron and all his family had perished. On the cold winter's day when I learned this news, I thought to myself that the fire, which the police had written off as an accident, might well have been caused by the British wizards. It occurred to me that they might have thought the baron was me. Unable to do anything more for him, I said a prayer in the company of another tramp and, shortly afterwards, dying of curiosity, I went to see Villa Nemo, where I savoured the morbid pleasure of strolling about, bearded and ragged, amongst the ruins of what had once been my dazzling mansion. Only four walls remained standing and the house was very much like the house I had discovered one April evening years before, the house that had so fascinated me. The garden was beginning to grow wild again, there was no lock or knocker on the door. It had returned to being the same abandoned house I had seen that first time, a house so adept at self-abandon.

  I thought about Villa Nemo in the days that followed and an irresistible electric force urged me to return, to return and live there again. And last night I came back to stay. Very excited, standing on one of the galleries open to the winds, gleefully looking out on the now totally wild garden, I decided to come and live in the house, or rather, in what remained of the house. I told myself that, after all, not only was it the ideal dwelling for a vagabond like myself, it was also the most familiar, comfortable place I knew and doubtless ideal for parties for one, for the intimate parties that would be held each night after my exhausting travails as a mad beater of pavements.

  That is what I thought last night, when I returned to live in what had once been my luxurious bedroom. And perhaps because I could not stop thinking about all that or perhaps because of the cold (which my one blanket could do nothing to disguise), I took a long time to go to sleep. Around midnight, I was again woken by the cold. I began considering making a fire out of what remained of a wardrobe that had partially survived the blaze and which I knew very well, for it had once belonged to me. While I was weighing up that possibility and as if the wardrobe had realised my intentions, I seemed to hear the sound of creaking and moaning emerging from its depths. I thought it must be my imagination, but the creaking came again, and then the sound of chains, and finally, a heartrending cry.

  `Who's there?' I said, lighting a match and still not entirely losing my calm.

  No one answered. By the light of that slender match, the wardrobe seemed different from the one I had known. It looked like an upended submarine. It was an art deco design, which I had never noticed before either. I remembered the words of the baron when he had suggested I sell him Villa Nemo with the submarine included. And I remembered too when he had asked me if his ancestors' ghosts were quite happy haunting the house. The match burned out, and for a few seconds, plunged into darkness, I felt a certain respect for the shadows, which I soon put paid to by lighting another match.

  `Who's there?' I said again, trying to keep my voice firm and steady. I received no reply that time either, but just as I was preparing to go back to sleep, the creaking resumed. I realised that I must confront the situation whatever the consequences, and then, commending myself to all the saints in the world, I wrenched open the wardrobe door.

  Nothing. There was nothing and no one inside. I went back to my bed, wrapped myself in the blanket, and tried to get to sleep. I was once more considering turning the submarine into a good blazing fire when the creaking recommenced, this time accompanied by an unmistakable lament.

  `Don't burn me,' I heard a voice saying. `If you do, I will offer no resistance, but I fear that, in the attempt, you will lose all your strength. I am a spirit.'

  `Who's there,' I said again, feeling alarmed this time.

  `It's your friend, Baron de Mulder. My ruin in this world was forged in this very room, in this house I lost all my family, in this wardrobe I kept my finest clothes. This house is mine: let me have it.'

  I didn't dare light another match, afraid that he might think I was about to set fire to the wardrobe.

  `I would never have recognised your voice, Baron,' I said, trying to recover my presence of mind.

  ,if you could see me, you would appreciate the great physical change I have undergone too. The fire transformed me into a pale, emaciated figure who spends each night standing in this wardrobe. It's a pity you can't see me and have a good laugh. It's a pity you still belong to the land of the living and cannot appreciate the truly comic nature of my slender, supernatural appearance.'

  I tried to explain to him that it did not seem logical to me that, given that he was a ghost and had the chance to visit all the most beautiful places on earth (for I presumed that distance now meant nothing to him), he should choose to return to the one place where he had suffered most.

  `I know I'm foolish,' he said, `but I enjoy it, just as I love being thin and miserable. Because, my dear friend, I have great natural reserves of laughter, and I laugh all the time and, the more miserable I am, the more I laugh.'

  And he laughed. And had he not already been dead, he would have died laughing right there and then.

  `You laugh in a terribly serious way,' I said. `I don't know that you could really call it laughter as such. Listen to mine, for example.'

  I demonstrated to him how to laugh in a cheerful, carefree manner and, as I did so, I felt the gentle but powerful connection between his laughter and mine. There was a current of mutual sympathy between us, the stimulating solidarity of the wretched. And there was something very strange in both of us that triggered the growth or the emergence into the light of a hidden electricity lurking deep inside the other.

  I remarked on this, but he did not reply. Then I thought that perhaps it was because what I had said had made him anxious. After all, what I had said was all very well, but the fact was we could never be a truly electrifying double act if I did not take a fundamental step (which only I could take) that would place me, like the baron, outside my dirty, crumpled clothes, outside my beard, this room, the submarine, outside this life.

  That is why now I am waiting for night to fall and for the baron to return to his wardrobe. I have everything ready, the strychnine with which I will take that last fundamental step and which will allow me at last to form an electrifying artistic double act, an act that will soon be going on tour, a triumphant tour of outer space.

  © Enrique Vila-Matas

  Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) has published both novels and short stories: Impostura (1984), Historia abreviada de la literatura portatil (1985), Una casa para siempre (1988), Hijos sin hyos (1993), Lejos de Veracruz (1995) and Extrana forma de vida (1997). He has also published two compilations of essays and articles: El viajero mas lento (1992) and El traje de los domingos (1995), and is a regular contributor to the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais. `In Search of the Electrifying Double Act' was originally published in a collection of stories about imaginary suicides - Suicidios ejemplares (Anagrama, 1991) - which, like much of his work, is a disconcerting mixture of comedy and tragedy.

  It is very likely that, amongst these people thronging the station to greet the trains as they come in, I will find the man I am looking for. It is likely too that, when I kill him, I will be doing him a favour. From the barrier, in the passageway leading out of the station, I have often observed the faces of travellers. Tired, tetchy people with hesitant eyes. Destroyed by some family tragedy, a bereavement, a financial disaster, perhaps an adulterous relationship. Others, with the wide, vacant, gentle eyes of those who have just been told by a doctor that there is no hope. Yes, in that mass of lives arriving on the nine o'clock train, amongst those who are off to the station cinema to pass the time as they wait, I am bound to find the man I have to kill. For I have to kill a man. I can't leave it until tomorrow. Everyone at home is away and I can do what I like. It will be a most valuable experience. A man with
out a name, without an address, perhaps someone who has already considered suicide. A man who will bear in the lines in the palm of his hand the astonishing warning that today, Saturday, he will meet me.

  It wasn't hard to find him. There are many people who think about death, who call to it, who dream of it as they lie resting. As usual, I was leaning on the railings that separate the passageway from Customs. Even if there had been another ten thousand people, I would have spotted him at once. Each time he bent his knees as he walked, he was swathed in burgeoning light, in an irrepressible lassitude. There he is. He threw his suitcases down on the customs officers' bench like someone sloughing off ... I don't quite know what. His shoulders are too hunched, the line of his lips too anxious for so impersonal an act as opening up his suitcases for a border guard. I think that was when he saw me for the first time. I won't be so foolish as to say that he smiled at me. He could no longer smile by then. But perhaps his eyes ... He must have been asking himself, like so many other people in Customs, where should I look? All smugglers ask themselves that question; I have sometimes asked myself the same thing. But that wasn't why he was doing it. It was because I didn't know where to look. That is why he noticed me.

  Perhaps that is why he said nothing when, with much armwaving, they relieved him of a pearl necklace, a film projector, a few packets of American cigarettes and a bundle of German marks. By then, he could only speak to me; his life belonged to me, but I could not enter the Customs area. When the formalities were over, I approached him; he was crumpling up the receipt for the confiscated items and putting it in the pocket of that large camel hair overcoat that attracted the attention of the station employees and the police. Even the soldiers on station detail turned to look at him. I will have to get rid of that overcoat. When I thought that, I went cold.

  We sat down for a while in the station cafe. He confessed that he had eaten nothing all day. We barely spoke. It was as if everything had already been said, and we had set off into new territory. It was pleasant looking out through the windows at the bustle in the station, barrows piled with luggage, groups of hikers returning home with their rucksacks fuller than when they had arrived and carrying small pots as souvenirs. People, passport in hand, queuing up at the various offices, for the police, the bureau de change, the Department of Health. A couple are desperately kissing, the young man is a soldier; my companion looks at them, unsmiling, and says: Bah! People go up and down the steps to the lavatories. A blind man, selling lottery tickets, taps insistently on the wall with his stick. The woman at the stall selling postcards and newspapers hands over the accounts to a short, hunchbacked man who has arrived for the night shift. The lights of six different trains have come on simultaneously above the announcement board. Six times there is the same crush of people, the same weariness at the station exit and the same cries of `Taxi! Taxi!' and `Do you need a hotel?F 'Looking for a cheap place to stay?' That is when I invited my guest to come home with me. We will be alone, you can rest. I don't know what he said in reply, because, as I was talking, the loudspeaker from the station cinema blared out its latest programme, including news of the floods in Bavaria, and I couldn't hear what he said. I noticed, though, when I looked at him, trying to guess at his response, that his deep-set eyes were pale, in contrast to his thick, black beard. I was afraid that he might die before I could ... I don't know what his answer was, but he came with me.

  My house is not far from the station, but we took a long time to get there. I've walked that same route several times a day for years. It was the first time I'd counted the clocks as I passed: five, excluding the station clock. The clock on the tower of the Trinitarian convent, with its light still bearing traces of the dark blue paint required by the civil defence, the clock on the central lamp post at the Navas de Tolosa roundabout, where the traffic policeman has his little hut, then the one at Winter's the clockmakers, on the corner, with words instead of numbers on the face, the really ugly clock in the square and the one outside Omega. Perhaps it only took the usual fifteen minutes, but it seemed longer. He kept walking more and more slowly, whilst I was walking faster and faster. I almost had to drag him across the final junctions. We both knew perfectly well what was going to happen. My anger was growing from my elbows down, and a distant, desolate night was sprouting on his shoulders. Crossing the square - it was a quarter past ten (he said twenty-two fifteen, which made me think that he must speak a different language) - you could hear the powerful thrum of the river. A group of students emerged from a cafe along with a gust of cigarette smoke and the voice of a female singer: `I go in search of death . . .' It frightened me and, deep down, I cursed her. He continued walking, his shoulders hunched, no longer daring to ask after his suitcases, which we had placed in the left luggage office.

  He was panting as we went up the stairs. The shadow of the bannister imprisoned his breathing, a coming and going, an escaping and a sighing. I felt all my irritation crumble when I turned and saw a confident sadness bloom on his lips. It seemed to me that he was counting the steps. I was tempted to encourage him, to offer him my arm, to say a few words of consolation, We're nearly there, or It's the next floor, or You'll be able to rest soon. I did not do so. It occurred to me that any criminal would do his best to say nothing, to avoid meeting one of the neighbours on the stairs, no ... no ... When I turned the key for the second time, I still thought I could see the ruin of a smile on his face, perhaps it was the light, or the hot breath of the heating.

  On other occasions, when my family went off to stay in the country, I would take advantage of being alone at home to get together with friends until late at night, or to arrange a romantic assignation. Tonight was different. I wanted to kill a man. He was there already, sitting in the hall, asking me where the bathroom was, with exasperating docility. I was just beginning to think that it was all going to be too easy when, suddenly, I felt afraid. The furniture blared, the curtains filled up with grubby white shadows, a deceptive clamour rippled in my ears. I made my way quickly to my bedroom. He was in the bathroom and stayed there for some time. I put on all the lights. How would I do it, who was he, and what would happen afterwards. He's coming out, I heard the sound of water, the bolt, footsteps, he's coming down the corridor, he sneezed, he must have stopped to look at a painting and wipe his nose, he's coming now, he appears in the doorway, his coat over his arm and his trousers undone. He lets himself fall onto the bed without saying a word. If only he had said something.

  There's no point strangling him. He stretched out comfortably on the hard mattress of my unmade bed, cleared his throat twice, rubbed his shoulders as if settling down to sleep, and then he died. I didn't need to kill him. Having nothing else to hand, I covered him with the mattress from the other bed, where my brother sleeps. The sadness that oozed out from him when we were coming up the stairs was now penetrating the room, filling it with an all-pervading chill. I was just about to sit down and think about him properly for the first time when the telephone rang, Chonita was inviting me to an improvised cold supper; then she could drive me out into the country to join my family. I rushed out, forgetting completely that it was Saturday and that I was alone in the house, forgetting that I had gone to the station and that in my bedroom a man had, well, died, I didn't kill him, though I had wanted to.

  I don't understand this feeling of anxiety. My arm hurts, both arms do, I feel an enormous weight on one side, I'm gasping for air and my breath is sour. I have woken in the middle of a nightmare. Someone, in my apartment in the city, was going through my papers, trying on my clothes, signing my name, using my pen, addressing obscene remarks to Chonita's photo and smashing the frame containing my school leaver's certificate. I woke up feeling ice cold and crying out because I saw that he was about to turn over the mattress on my bed, because then ... My God, what have I done. Three months have gone by now, and I haven't given that man a single thought. Whether I killed him. Or didn't kill him. I'm on the verge of tears trying to work out whether I did this thing that so sh
ames and horrifies me, or if, on the contrary, it was a dream, an hallucination that comes and goes, a painful, crazed toing and froing, piercing my temples and my throat. I should leave, I will. I look at the clock: it's stopped. I peer out of the window: I cannot tell the time by the stars, which I can barely identify, and, besides, sleep overwhelms me. I go back to bed and ... Yes, there's no doubt about it: I can almost hear his voice (`I haven't felt like eating all day'), his breathless gait ('do you think the suitcases. . . ' `do you think they'll give me back the necklace'?) I don't want to remember any more. He'll be there. Perhaps his body began to stink as it decomposed and someone has noticed it. The woman upstairs has a dog and they say that dogs can sense when someone has died. It's probably been scratching at the door, and ... Another possibility is that my mother had someone go in and do the cleaning one day and they will have found him there and removed him. Or the police will have, because he was a foreigner, that is, he came into the country with a passport. He said twenty-two fifteen, rather than a quarter past ten and ... Three months have gone by. I don't know if I killed him or not. But I know that I took him home intending to kill him.

  During the journey, I tried several times to start up conversations about a corpse being found in ... a foreigner who ... Nothing. No one took any notice. Either no one knew anything about it, or else it was a frequent occurrence. When silence falls, I smother my disquiet by reciting verses to myself. `With ten cannon on either side, with a following wind and sails unfurled . . .' or `Remember the sleeping soul . . .'. I also count the beating of the wheels on the tracks, tata-tracata, tata-tracata, ten, eleven, twelve ... eighty, eighty-one ... or I watch the telegraph wires, in stiff parallel lines, rising and falling. I vomited out of the window just thinking of the smell in my room when I go in there.