When your mother disappeared, Gal sought refuge in his writing as never before. It became his obsession—or, perhaps, better said: more of an obsession than ever. What he wanted was to write a book so that she would read it. Gal Ackerman had a fragmentary mind-set. He thought, spoke, lived in discrete segments. He wrote constantly, but was incapable of instilling any sort of unity into his work or life. Our pact—so to speak—was something I only became aware of gradually. Looking back, after he died, I saw how Gal had been showing me, very subtly, what he wanted his book to be like—what sort of message he wanted your mother to read, someday. I was in Taos working on a story. One night, when I got back to my hotel, there was a message waiting: call the Oakland immediately. When Frank told me the news, I thought: that’s it. I had to follow through. I had to honor our pact. Frank Otero played a crucial role throughout the process, as you know. If it hadn’t been for him, Gal’s book would never have seen the light of day. Frank loved Gal Ackerman, and he wanted to see his friend’s last wish granted. If the novel remained unfinished, what had Gal’s life been for, in the end? Gal never shut up about the thing, Frank told me, and Frank had watched Gal write it year after year at the bar, seated at his table, the Captain’s Table. Moreover, and this is important, Frank had witnessed firsthand the end of Gal’s so-called love story with Nadia. He got to know her a bit, as well. Your mother spent more than a few nights at the motel. She even lived there for a while, if not too long. And, before he died, Gal gave me the key to his studio. See, he’d planned it all in advance. And, without his even knowing about Gal’s scheme, Frank decided in all innocence to offer me the room soon thereafter. So you’ll see how much responsibility I’d inherited: I’d become not only the bridge between Gal and your mother, but also between Gal Ackerman and Frank Otero. How could I refuse? I dug in. I practically moved into Gal’s room—because that’s where the material was, for one thing. And it’s just an ideal place to write. I never really understood why Gal insisted on going down to the Oakland to work instead of staying put. At first, I would spend just a few hours a day on the book, late in the afternoon. It wasn’t long, though, before I began to see the true dimensions of the project—all the material I would have to revise, sort, reconstruct, or destroy. A few hours a day weren’t going to be enough. If I wanted to finish the novel, I had to really make a commitment, and that’s what I did. I would get up at four-thirty in the morning so that I could work for a couple of hours before going to the newspaper, and then when I left the office I went right back to the motel to keep on working, as if my time actually earning money had just been a regrettable parenthesis. Weekend or weekday, holiday, blackout, drought, or storm, I kept on working. And that’s not to mention all the research and legwork I had to do—talking with people who’d known Gal, hoping to fill in the gaps in all the stories he’d left for me to piece through. Yes, “all the stories,” because Nadia’s is just one among many—he might have been writing his novel for her, but he would be damned before giving her the pleasure of its being all about her into the bargain. But, look, I was still in the early stages of the process—I didn’t know what I was dealing with, yet. It was a staggering amount of work, so much so that I really did begin to worry I’d lose my mind before being able to set down the final period. After a while, I began to see everything else in life as a distraction—just a bunch of obstacles trying to prevent me from bringing the project to an end. The biggest hindrance continued to be my full-time job, naturally. I had begun writing pieces for Travel Magazine shortly before Gal’s death, but when work on the novel began in earnest, I didn’t feel as though I could keep interrupting Brooklyn to jet off to the other end of the country to write a piece. I explained to Dylan Taylor that my contributions to the magazine would have to take a back seat, and he didn’t hold it against me; but even without having to leave New York, it became less and less possible for me to steal time from the book project. I couldn’t spend my day working at the New York Post and then just plunge right back into the world of Gal’s novel. It was then that Frank offered to be my sponsor—that was the word he used. I laughed it off at first, but he was serious. He said he’d pay me a salary until I finished, and he wouldn’t back off. How long would it take for me to finish Brooklyn? What are you making a month at the Post? I refused, but I might as well have been trying to convince the sun to stay down. No matter what excuse I made, he responded the same way: ours was a perfect arrangement. The best I could do was convince Frank to only give me half of what he’d offered. I may add an extra allowance here and there he replied, not fully understanding my motives, and shook my hand as if we had just signed a contract.
My bosses were understanding, as far as it went. They told me not to worry, that although they couldn’t promise me anything, they would more than likely have a job for me when I returned. And who says New York is so cutthroat? After that, I guess you could say that I stopped living for a couple of years—that I spent two years in someone else’s skin, a prisoner of a world Gal had created, reading letters, diaries, notebooks, story drafts, choosing which papers to keep, which to burn. During the second year, I hardly left the studio. I was living in a fiction, albeit an “autobiographical” one, as they say. It was the only way to finish the book, I thought—someone else’s book, that is. Now I can’t help but feel it’s a little bit mine as well. The last thing I worked on was a bunch of disparate odds and ends that dated from various points in Gal’s life. He had been conscientiously correcting them during the months before his death. His intention was to place them at the end of his manuscript. The novel has an open ending, as you know—a section describing Gal and Nadia’s last meeting at Bryant Park, two avenues away from Port Authority where everything had begun. They would never see each other again. Nadia had to catch a bus to Boston at the 42nd Street terminal, but Gal had decided not to accompany her all the way . . . Anyway, I had to write around the clock if I wanted to get the novel to Fenners Point on the second anniversary of his death. I almost didn’t make it. On April 10, 1992, I typed in the last word. The last weeks were a maddening frenzy. Brooklyn was an imperfect creature, as all books are—some more than others, of course—but now it existed, it had taken form, it had a life. I said to myself: that’s it, mission accomplished. I went to the Danish cemetery and put the book in Frank’s niche . . .
The worst was yet to come, however. I was done, but I didn’t feel done. It was the beginning of a very serious crisis. I’m not talking about the post-partum emptiness you always stumble into at the end of a long and intense project, although of course that was part of it. No, what was bothering me was that even after having carried out my part of our pact, the shadow of the author continued to haunt me. I was still waking up every morning in the world of Gal’s book. I’d fallen into a trap—a trap that included not just the novel, but the Oakland, Brooklyn, the States. I had to get away, put some distance between us, do other things, live my own life. There’s something dangerous about the Oakland. It doesn’t want to let go, once it’s gotten its hooks into you.
Frank insisted I could stay in the motel as long as I wanted. But that was just what I didn’t want. I was afraid that what had happened to Gal and others before him would happen to me. Niels Claussen was a good example. One of the things that I learned, writing the novel—and I learned quite a few things, I’ll have you know—was how difficult it is to get past the sense that what you read on a page has some basis in fact. The story of Niels wasn’t in the book just because it had inspired Gal to start collecting material for his Death Notebook . . . No, it was a sort of parable. Tragedy comes for all of us, sooner or later. Tragedy is all around us, all the time. But that’s not the important thing. No, the really bone-chilling thing about Claussen’s story wasn’t what had happened to him—it was that he was incapable of reinventing himself afterward. He just gave up. See, the Oakland didn’t finish him off physically; it did something worse. It turned him into a zombie when he was all of twenty-six years old. Gal was just as much of
a goner, if you think about it. He couldn’t function away from the site of his defeat. So, no, there was no way I would stay in the motel. I had to go off on my own. I’d taken a long detour, but now I was back on the main road I didn’t bother to call Tom Archer. If I had, no doubt he would have offered me some kind of gig. But, no, I had to be strong and sever all ties, just go, go, go—find a life somewhere else, keep moving forward. I had just turned thirty-four. Old enough to give up forever, if I wasn’t careful. I didn’t know what to do, only that I had to do something—perhaps return to Spain. Anything but stay put.
Things couldn’t go back to the way they had been before. Finishing Gal’s book shook the foundations of my personality. Forced me to review my entire life. So much that I thought had been stable had been blown to bits. But that was fine. I decided to reinvent myself, a very American conceit that—ironically—I now utilized precisely to sever my ties with that country forever. I renounced my future as a journalist, into which I (and so many others) had put so much stock. I said good-bye to Brooklyn, to New York, to the States, the friends I had made there, the landscapes that I had come to love, the beauty of American literature. I said good-bye to the things that had made me what I was. I said good-bye to Frank, to Gal, to Nadia, to Nélida, to Niels Claussen, to Victor Báez, to Abe Lewis, to Umberto Pietri, to Teresa Quintana, to Felipe Alfau, to Jesús Colón, to Mister Tuttle, to all the characters who had paraded in front of me and were now ensnared forever in the pages of a novel I had managed to complete for a dead friend. I needed to do it—to be myself again. And with all the clarity of a ray of light seeping through a crack in a sealed basement window, I saw that I wasn’t leaving empty-handed. No: I had, after all, become a writer.
At the beginning of November, around the time of my birthday, Bruno had to go to Paris; he invited me to spend a week with him in the city of my birth. We would go on long walks, see as much art as we could, attend concerts, and eat out. On my birthday, we would go to Dominique, Nadia’s favorite restaurant. It’s in Montparnasse, a real storied sort of place—it was founded back in the twenties by a White Russian exile. Knowing I might be a little disconcerted at the venue, Bruno told me that it was difficult for him too, but we had to make an effort, because that’s what Nadia would have wanted. I acquiesced; he had me dead to rights. When the time came, though, I couldn’t handle it. Right before going into the restaurant, everything went blurry, and my knees got weak. Bruno held me by my shoulders, trying to comfort me as well as keep me upright. He repeated what he had told me over the phone from Tokyo, that wherever Nadia might be, she would be happy that we were celebrating my birthday at one of her old stamping grounds. Seeing him so self-assured, I managed to recover, and in we went. The maître d’ recognized us right away, even after so long, and led us obligingly to “our” table. The tradition with the three of us had been to give presents only during dessert. When we had it in front of us, Bruno brought up that phone conversation—when he’d made those ominous hints about some big secret concerning my mother. He put a metal box on the table. I asked him if it was my gift, and he said that it was. Before he told me where he got it, he implored me not to open it until I was alone in my room at our hotel.
He had come across the box one morning after having mustered the fortitude and composure required to go through the papers that Nadia kept in her bureau. The box was the first thing he’d seen when he rolled up the top of her writing desk. He took off the lid in the same state of anxiety as when he had gone through her chest of drawers, or the armoires where she kept her wardrobe and jewelry, or when he had inspected the knickknacks she kept in her numerous music boxes. The first thing he saw were some old papers, on top of which were an old silver necklace and earrings. He pushed aside the jewelry and cast a quick glance at the papers. Somewhere in the pile was a clothbound diary. He hesitated before opening it. A few fragments picked out from the text at random were enough for him to know what it was about. He put the lid on the box again as though he’d seen a dozing cobra inside—those were his words. The passages he had read brought other things to mind. Things my mother had told him in passing, but that were begging to be assembled into a whole that my father nonetheless determined he had no right to know about. But I was her daughter, and that was different. The loss of my mother was still very fresh in my mind, he knew. This would probably bring me closer to her. It would help me to get to know her better. Besides, I was like Nadia in so many ways. He grabbed my hands firmly, urging me to finish my dessert, because we had to leave for the opera very soon.
I opened the box later that night. The necklace and the earrings were very beautiful, the silver engraved with Aztec figures. I looked at them, knowing somehow that these were gifts another man had given my mother. The diary is news to you, I know, but the papers you already know about. I’m sure you understand now why I resisted sending you the full inventory by e-mail—don’t you?—although in the end, I gave in, I know. As I’ve already told you, my interest in the papers varied piece to piece, depending on the subject matter. What we’ve ended up calling the “literary” papers, I only glanced at, and they failed to capture my interest—sorry. And the letters, yes of course, I read them all in one go, but what I kept going back to was the diary. It was a medium-sized journal, black, like the ones you say Gal used to write in. It was no longer than a hundred pages and was about half filled. It wasn’t easy to read, but not because of the handwriting, which was so familiar to me, but because of the language my mother used—solipsistic, I guess: cryptic, the syntax disjointed, the language of someone talking to herself. She mixed hermetic references with descriptions of events so lacking in detail that at times it was impossible to know what on earth she was talking about. It was like reading poetry in a language you barely understand. But yet I did get something out of it. I mean, one thing was very clear. The majority of the entries referred to the relationship that my mother’d had with Gal Ackerman. She didn’t mention any lovers, specifically, although I knew that Gal hadn’t been the only one. (I don’t count my father—his name does appear in a couple of entries too.) Reading Nadia’s diary was like a journey to some remote and secret place. It was clear that the journal, along with the stack of papers and the objects that accompanied them, all meant a lot to my mother. She’d found a way, through her annotations, to keep alive the feelings she’d had in those days, good or bad—her writing had nailed them into place forever. Trapped in those pages, the love that my mother had felt for that strange man remained alive, although in real life she had moved on long ago. The entries were brief and sparse, covering a span of several years. At first, there was a sort of continuity between them, then the entries became more sporadic, and then dropped off entirely. The last entry floated alone on a recto page, as though it had gotten lost. The handwriting there was a little more legible than usual for her, as if she had written it very slowly. She writes about a letter in which someone had succinctly communicated to her that Gal Ackerman was dead—had died, in fact, two years before. When I first read it, I didn’t pay attention to the date or the name of the sender or the name of the place in which this Gal person was buried. I only registered the fact of the death. I went through the rest of the diary, but there were no further entries. I cried for a long time, until I was left feeling utterly devoid of energy. I hadn’t even realized they were coming, those tears. It was a cloudburst, and I was surprised at myself.
I turned off the light, exhausted. Though it had slipped from my hands long before, the diary’s words went on parading in front of me, out of order, stirring up a new onslaught of images. I had read everything in one sitting, condensing into a few hours what had taken my mother years to live and write. It was too much to come to terms with—or not with any coherence. Some details of the story were very clear, while others, likely, hadn’t even registered. I don’t remember how long it took me to fall asleep; I didn’t notice it happen, and my dreams were about waiting to sleep; it felt interminable, as though I’d never get back to the
sunlit world. I saw Nadia in the room with me, reading aloud from the diary as she caressed my head, which I had laid on her lap. Since I thought I hadn’t fallen asleep yet, I almost believed she was really there.
Had I done the right thing by reading everything straight through? Should I have exercised restraint, like my father, and so have avoided looking into the void? But of course, he’d been the one to hand it over. He must have wanted this. Wanted me to get to know my mother better. Wanted me to go into the secret place from which he was—necessarily—barred. Perhaps even to report back on what I’d found there. But what about the effect on me? On her memory? Fresh from my semi-dream, I caught myself imagining her watching me from someplace unimaginable . . . what would she think of me now? The question kept coming: The diary was exclusively centered on Gal Ackerman. Why not other men too, except for in passing? They had existed—I was certain of that much. She had even married another one after leaving Gal, that musician whose name she had taken for a few years . . . not even a hint of that guy in there. The diary had been reserved for one man only. Why such devotion to a man who seemed—to me, anyway—like nothing more than a stain that had tainted so much of her old life?
I’m young, I know, but even so—I’ve been hurt plenty in what must seem to you a very short time. Maybe a man like you would find it all pretty ridiculous if I made a clean breast of all my amorous catastrophes. But Nadia was different. Her wounds were very deep—the real thing, if you like. That’s what I discovered reading the diary. Bruno and I didn’t talk about this at all, of course, although during breakfast he could see perfectly well how affected I had been by reading the diary. I took the whole package back with me to New York, but kept the box shut tight. I was almost scared to disturb it again. I remembered what Bruno had told me, that the moment he realized what was inside the box, he put the lid back as if he had seen a dozing cobra inside. Later, early in December, I think, Nadia made another appearance in my dreams: She was barefoot and wearing a tunic, and her hair was up in a bun. She looked very young, younger than when she gave birth to me. She wore the earrings and silver necklace that she had put away inside the box. She wouldn’t talk to me. I wasn’t even sure that she could see me. She was standing up, leaning on a marble column like a Greek goddess. She was carrying the box. I tried to approach her but I couldn’t. I called on her, sometimes by her name, Nadia, Nadia. Other times, in a much quieter voice, I just said Mama. She didn’t respond. At some point, she glanced toward me, perfectly composed, beautiful, but she remained silent. I asked her if it was okay that I had read her papers. She put the box on the floor. The lid lifted off on its own and a horrible bird popped out to fly off and perch on some brambles that were there, and had always been there, you know, the way things are in dreams. My mother turned around and walked away, ignoring my calls. I woke up sweating and disoriented. I know, it sounds like a movie—the echo of my cries seemed to hang in the air around me. I went looking for the box as soon as I came to my senses. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just wanted to be sure it was still there, and that it wasn’t concealing any avian stowaways. I certainly had no intention of reading anything. If I wanted anything concrete, it was just to touch the pages, to run my finger across the words that my mother had written, to caress the necklace and the earrings she had been wearing in the dream. Sure, I leafed through the pages, but I did my best not to understand whatever phrases my eyes couldn’t help but light upon. When I reached the last page she’d used, I stopped, winded, as though I’d been climbing a mountain and had finally reached the inhospitable peak. It took a while for the words I had in front of me to register:
Call Me Brooklyn Page 33
