Bonsai

by Alejandro Zambra

  Gazmuri: Then you don’t know what I’m talking about, you don’t know the drive. There’s a drive when you write on paper, a sound to the pencil. A strange equilibrium between elbow, hand, and pencil.

  Julio talks, but what he says is not heard. Someone should turn up his volume. Gazmuri’s throaty and intense voice, on the other hand, booms, works perfectly well:

  Do you write novels, those novels with short chapters, forty pages long, that are in fashion?

  Julio: No. And he adds, to have something to say: Would you recommend that I write novels?

  What kind of question is that? I’m not recommending anything to you, I don’t recommend anything to anyone. Do you think I met with you in this café to give you advice?

  It’s difficult to talk to Gazmuri, Julio thinks. Difficult yet pleasant. Immediately Gazmuri begins to talk entirely by himself. He talks about diverse political and literary conspiracies, and emphasizes, in particular, one idea: one must protect oneself from the cosmetologists of death. I am sure that you would like to put makeup on me. Young people like you approach old people because they like that we are old. Being young is a disadvantage, not a virtue. You should know that. When I was young I felt at a disadvantage, and now as well. Being old is also a disadvantage. Because the old are weak and we not only need the flattery of the young, we need, deep down, their blood. An old man needs a lot of blood, whether he writes novels or not. And you have a lot of blood. Perhaps the only thing you’ve got to spare, now that I’m getting a good look at you, is blood.

  Julio doesn’t know what to say. Gazmuri’s strong laugh saves him, a laugh that suggests that at least part of what he just said was in jest. And Julio laughs with him; it amuses him to be here, working as a secondary character. He wants, as much as possible, to stay in that role, but to stay in that role with security he should say something, something that will earn him relevance. A joke, for example. But the joke doesn’t come out. He says nothing. It’s Gazmuri who says:

  At this corner something very important happens in the novel that you’re going to transcribe. That’s why I had you meet me here. Toward the end of the novel, right on this corner, something important happens, this is an important corner. For all of this, how much are you thinking of charging me?

  Julio: A hundred thousand pesos?

  Julio is actually willing to work for free, even though, certainly, he has no money to spare. It seems a privilege to him to drink coffee and smoke dark cigarettes with Gazmuri. He said a hundred thousand the way he said good morning before, mechanically. And he keeps listening, he lags a little behind Gazmuri, he smiles and nods, although he would rather listen to all of it, absorb information, remain, now, full of information:

  Let’s say that this will be my most personal novel. It’s quite different from the prior ones. I’ll summarize it a little for you: he finds out that a girlfriend from his youth has died. He turns on the radio, like every morning, and hears the woman’s name in the obituaries. Two first names and two last names. That’s how it all begins.

  All of what?

  Everything, absolutely everything. I’ll call you, then, as soon as I make my decision.

  And what else happens?

  Nothing, the same as always. Everything goes to hell. I’ll call you, then, once I make my decision.

  Julio walks toward his apartment, visibly confused. Perhaps it was a mistake to ask for a hundred thousand pesos, though he also isn’t sure that sum would be a significant amount for a person like Gazmuri. He needs the money, of course. Twice a week he teaches Latin classes to the daughter of a right-wing intellectual. That and the remaining balance of a credit card his father gave him constitute his entire salary.

  He lives on the subterranean floor of a building on the Plaza Italia. When the heat dazes him, he passes the time watching people’s shoes through the window. That afternoon, just before turning his key, he realizes that María, his lesbian neighbor, is arriving. He sees her shoes, her sandals. And he waits, he calculates the footsteps and her greeting of the doorman, until he feels her coming and then he concentrates on opening the door: he pretends to have put in the wrong key, though there are only two keys on the ring. It seems that none of them fits, he says in a very loud voice, while he looks at her from the corner of his eye, and manages to see a little. He sees her long white hair, which makes her face seem darker than it actually is. Once they had a conversation about Severo Sarduy. She is not much of a reader, but she knows the work of Severo Sarduy very well. She is forty or forty-five years old, she lives alone, she reads Severo Sarduy: because of that, because two plus two is four, Julio thinks María is a lesbian. Julio also likes Sarduy, especially his essays, thanks to which he always has conversation topics with gays and lesbians.

  That afternoon María looks less restrained than usual, in a dress she rarely wears. Julio is about to mention it, but he restrains himself, thinking that perhaps she finds such comments disagreeable. To forget his interview with Gazmuri, he invites her over for coffee. They talk about Sarduy, about Cobra, about Cocuyo, about Big Bang, about Written on a Body. But also, and this is new, they talk about other neighbors, and about politics, strange salads, tooth whiteners, vitamin supplements, and a nut sauce she would like Julio to try one day. The moment arrives when they run out of topics and it seems inevitable that both of them return to their own activities. María is an English teacher, but she works at home translating manuals for software and sound systems. He tells her that he just got a good job, an interesting job, with Gazmuri, the novelist.

  I’ve never read him, but they say he’s good. I have a brother in Barcelona who knows him. They were in exile together, I think.

  And Julio: Tomorrow I’m starting to work with Gazmuri. He needs someone to transcribe his new novel, because he writes on paper, and he doesn’t like computers.

  And what’s the novel called?

  He wants us to talk about the title, to discuss it. A man learns from the radio that a love from his youth has died. That’s where it all begins, absolutely everything.

  And what happens next?

  He never forgot her, she was his great love. When they were young they took care of a little plant.

  A little plant? A bonsai?

  That’s it, a bonsai. They decided to buy a bonsai to symbolize the immense love that united them. After that everything goes to hell, but he never forgets her. He went on with his life, he had children, he got divorced, but he never forgot her. One day he finds out she has died. Then he decides to pay her homage. I still don’t know what that homage consists of.

  Two bottles of wine and then sex. Her small wrinkles suddenly seem more visible, despite the semi-darkness of the room. Julio’s movements are sluggish, María, on the other hand, takes the reins somewhat, aware of Julio’s indecision. The tremor abates a little, now it is more of a rhythmic and even sensible shudder that naturally drives the pelvic game.

  For a moment Julio lingers in María’s white hair: it feels like a fine yet incoherent cloth, immensely fragile. A cloth that must be caressed with care and love. But it is difficult to caress with care and love: Julio prefers to move down the torso and lift the dress. She runs her hand over Julio’s ears, strokes the shape of his nose, tidies his sideburns. He thinks that he should suck, not what a man would suck but rather what a woman would suck, the woman he imagines that she is imagining. But María interrupts Julio’s thoughts: Stick it in already, she says.

  At eight in the morning the phone rings. Miss Silvia, from Editorial Planeta, is charging me forty thousand pesos for the transcription, Gazmuri says. I’m sorry.

  Gazmuri’s dryness disconcerts him. It’s eight in the morning on a Sunday, the telephone just woke him up, the lesbian or non-lesbian or ex-lesbian sleeping at his side begins to stretch. Gazmuri has turned him down for the job, Miss Silvia, from Editorial Planeta, for forty thousand pesos, will do the job. Although María is not even awake enough to ask him who called or what time it is, Julio answers:

&nbs
p; That was Gazmuri, it seems he’s an early riser or very anxious. He called to confirm that we’ll be starting on Bonsai this very afternoon. That’s the title of the novel: Bonsai.

  What follows is something like a romance. A romance that lasts less than a year, until she goes to Madrid. María goes to Madrid because she has to go, but above all because she doesn’t have reasons to stay. All your chicks go off to Madrid, would have been the joke from Julio’s uninteresting friends, but Julio has no uninteresting friends, he has always protected himself from uninteresting friendships. Anyway, she is not the concern of this story. The story is concerned with Julio:

  He never forgot her, says Julio. He went on with his life, he had children and everything, he got divorced, but he never forgot her. She was a translator, just like you, but of Japanese. They had met when both were studying Japanese, many years before. When she dies, he thinks that the best way to remember her is to grow another bonsai.

  So he buys one?

  No, this time he doesn’t buy it, he grows it. He gets manuals, consults with experts, sows the seeds, goes half-crazy.

  María says it is a strange story.

  Yes, the thing is that Gazmuri writes very well. The way I’m telling it, it seems like a strange story, even melodramatic. But I’m sure Gazmuri knew how to give it form.

  The first imaginary meeting with Gazmuri takes place that very Sunday. Julio buys four Colón notebooks and spends the afternoon writing on a bench at the Parque Forestal. He writes frenetically, with feigned handwriting. At night he keeps working on Bonsai and on Monday morning he has already finished the first notebook of the novel. He smudges a few paragraphs, spills coffee, and also scatters ashes on the manuscript.

  To María: It’s the greatest test for a writer. In Bonsai almost nothing happens, the plot could be told in two paragraphs, a story that perhaps is not that good.

  And what are they called?

  The characters? Gazmuri didn’t name them. He says it’s better, and I agree: they are He and She, Huacho and Pochocha, John and Jane Doe, they don’t have names and maybe they don’t have faces either. The protagonist is a king or beggar, it’s all the same. A king or beggar that lets go of the only woman he ever truly loved.

  And he learned to speak Japanese?

  They met in a Japanese class. The truth is that I don’t know yet, I think that’s in the second notebook.

  In the following months Julio devotes his mornings to feigning Gazmuri’s handwriting and spends his afternoons at the computer transcribing a novel that he no longer knows to be another’s or his own, but which he has resolved to finish, finish imagining, at least. He thinks that the final text is the perfect farewell gift or the only possible gift for María. And that’s what he does, he finishes the manuscript and gives it to María.

  In the days after her departure, Julio starts various urgent emails that nevertheless stay stuck in his drafts folder. Finally he decides to send her the following text:

  You’ve been in my thoughts a lot. I’m sorry, but I haven’t had time to write to you. I hope you arrived well.

  Gazmuri wants us to keep working together, though he won’t specify on what. I imagine it’ll be another novel. The truth is, I don’t know whether I want to keep putting up with his indecision, his cough, the way he clears his throat, his theories. I haven’t gone back to teaching Latin. I don’t have much more to tell you. The novel will be released next week. At the last minute, Gazmuri decided to entitle it Spares. I don’t think it’s a good title, that’s why I’m a little angry at Gazmuri, but, in the end, he’s the author.

  Affectionately, J.

  Afraid and confused, Julio headed to the Biblioteca Nacional to attend the release of Spares, Gazmuri’s real novel. From the back of the room he manages to make out the author, who nods from time to time, conveying agreement with the observations of Ebensperger, the critic overseeing the presentation. The critic moves his hands insistently to demonstrate that he’s genuinely interested in the novel. The editor, for her part, watches the behavior of the crowd, making no attempt to appear otherwise.

  Julio only half-listens to the presentation: Professor Ebensperger refers to literary courage and artistic intransigence, he evokes, in passing, a book of Rilke’s, he draws on an idea from Walter Benjamin (though he does not credit the author), and he recalls a poem of Enrique Lihn’s (referring to him, simply, as Enrique) which, according to him, synthesizes the conflict of Spares to perfection: “A gravely ill man / masturbates to show signs of life.”

  Before the editor can take the floor, Julio leaves the room and heads toward Providencia. Half an hour later, almost without realizing it, he has arrived at the café where he met Gazmuri. He decides to stay there, waiting for something important to happen. Meanwhile he smokes. He drinks coffee and smokes.

  V. TWO DRAWINGS

  She died head-on, interrupting traffic.

  CHICO BUARQUE

  The end of this story should give us hope, but it doesn’t give us hope.

  On a certain particularly long afternoon Julio decides to start two drawings. In the first one a woman appears who is María but who also is Emilia: the dark, almost black eyes of Emilia and María’s white hair; María’s ass, Emilia’s thighs, María’s feet; the back of a daughter of a right-wing intellectual; Emilia’s cheeks, María’s nose, María’s lips; Emilia’s torso and diminutive breasts; the pubis of Emilia.

  The second drawing is easier in theory, but for Julio it is extremely difficult, he spends several weeks making sketches, until he arrives at the desired image:

  It is a tree on a precipice.

  Julio hangs both images on the bathroom mirror, as if they were recently developed photographs. And they stay there, completely covering the surface of the mirror. Julio doesn’t dare name the woman he has drawn. He calls her she. The she of he, it is understood. And he invents a story for her, a story he does not write, that he does not bother to write down.

  Since his father and mother refuse to give him money, Julio decides to become a vendor on the sidewalk of Plaza Italia. It’s an efficient business: in barely a week he sells almost half his books. He is paid especially well for the poems of Octavio Paz (The Best of Octavio Paz) and Ungaretti (The Life of a Man) and for an old edition of The Complete Works of Neruda. He also parts with a dictionary of quotations edited by Espasa Calpe, an essay by Claudio Giaconi on Gogol, a couple of Cristina Peri Rossi novels he never read, and, lastly, Alhué by González Vera, and Fermina Márquez by Valéry Larbaud, two novels he had in fact read, and many times, but that he would never read again.

  He uses some of the money from the sale for his research on bonsais. He buys specialized manuals and magazines, and deciphers them with methodical anxiety. One of the manuals, perhaps the least useful but also the most favorable for an amateur, begins this way:

  A bonsai is an artistic replica of a tree, in miniature. It consists of two elements: the living tree and the container. The two elements must be in harmony and the selection of the appropriate pot for a tree is almost an art form in itself. The tree can be a vine, a shrub, or a tree, but it is normally referred to as a tree. The container is normally a flowerpot or an interesting chunk of rock. A bonsai is never called a bonsai tree. The word already includes the living element. Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.

  Julio memorizes the definition, because he likes the notion that a rock could be considered interesting and the diverse points made in the paragraph seem fitting. “The selection of the appropriate pot for a tree is almost an art form in itself,” he thinks and repeats, until he convinces himself that essential information lies in these words. He becomes ashamed, then, of Bonsai, his improvised novel, his unnecessary novel, whose protagonist doesn’t even know that the selection of a flowerpot is an art form in itself, that a bonsai is not a bonsai tree because the word already contains the living element.

  Caring for a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like caring for a bonsai, thi
nks Julio.

  In the mornings he searches, reluctantly, for a stable job. He returns home in the middle of the afternoon and barely eats something before devoting his attention to the manuals: he tries to go about it as systematically as possible, invaded as he is by a hint of fulfillment. He reads until sleep overcomes him. He reads about the most common ailments of bonsais, about the pulverization of the leaves, about pruning, about the wire netting. He obtains, finally, seeds and tools.

  And he does it. He grows a bonsai.

  It’s a woman, a young woman.

  That’s all María manages to know about Emilia. The dead person is a dead woman, a young woman, someone says at her back. A young woman has thrown herself in front of the metro at Antón Martín. For a moment María thinks of approaching the place where it occurred but she immediately represses the impulse. She exits the metro thinking about the alleged face of that young woman who just committed suicide. She thinks of herself, at one time, sadder, more desperate than now. She thinks of a house in Chile, in Santiago de Chile, of a garden at that house. A garden without flowers or trees that nevertheless has the right—she thinks—to be called a garden, undoubtedly it is a garden. She recalls a song by Violeta Parra: “The flowers of my garden should be my nurses.” She walks toward the Fuentetaja bookstore, because she’s made a date to meet at the Fuentetaja bookstore with a suitor. The suitor’s name doesn’t matter, except that en route she thinks, suddenly, of him, and of the bookstore and of the whores on Montera street and also of other whores on other streets that are beside the point, and of a movie, of the name of a movie she saw five or six years ago. That’s how she starts to get distracted from Emilia’s story, from this story. María disappears on the way to Fuentetaja bookstore. She moves away from Emilia’s corpse and begins to disappear forever from this story.

  She’s gone.

  Now Emilia remains, alone, interrupting the operation of the metro.