Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  “Never.”

  At that point a fat, rather elegant girl came up to him, there in the Laundromat, and she handed him a cell phone.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  Jasper Gwyn took the phone.

  7

  “Jasper! Did you put in the fabric softener?”

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “I was writing.”

  “Bingo!”

  “Not in that sense.”

  “I don’t find that there are many senses, if someone is a writer he writes, that’s it. I told you, no one really succeeds in stopping.”

  “Tom, I’m in the Laundromat.”

  “I know, you’re always there. And at home you don’t answer.”

  “Books aren’t written in a Laundromat, you know, and anyway I wouldn’t write them.”

  “Bullshit. Come clean. What is it, a story?”

  The laundry was still in prewash, and there was no one leafing through magazines. So Jasper Gwyn thought he could try to explain. He told Tom Bruce Shepperd that he liked lining up words, and forming sentences, the way he might crack his knuckles. He did it in the closed space of his mind. It relaxed him.

  “Fantastic! I’ll come there, you speak, I record, and the book is done. You wouldn’t be the first to use a system like that.”

  Jasper Gwyn explained to him that they weren’t even stories, they were fragments, without a before and without an after—really, they could hardly even be called scenes.

  “Brilliant. I’ve already got the title.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Scenes from Books that I Will Never Write.”

  “You told me.”

  “Don’t move, I have to take care of two things and I’ll be there.”

  “Tom.”

  “Tell me, brother.”

  “Who is this elegant girl here?”

  “Rebecca? She’s new, very good.”

  “What does she do besides carry around a cell phone in Laundromats?”

  “She’s learning, you have to begin somewhere.”

  Jasper Gwyn thought that if there was one thing he didn’t like about having stopped being a writer it was that he would no longer have any reason to work with Tom Bruce Shepperd. He thought that one day Tom would stop following him around with his phone calls, and that would be a bad day. He wondered if it wouldn’t be right to tell him. There, in the Laundromat. Then he had a better idea.

  He closed the phone and nodded to the fat girl, who had moved a few steps away, out of politeness. He noticed that she had a very beautiful face, and, besides, she limited the damage by choosing her clothes well. He asked her if he could give her a message for Tom.

  “Of course.”

  “Be so kind then as to tell him that I miss him.”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean that sooner or later he’ll stop bothering me wherever I go, and I’ll feel the same relief you feel when you’re in a room and the refrigerator motor stops, but also the same inevitable dismay, and the sensation, which you surely know, of not being certain what to do with that sudden silence, and maybe not, ultimately, being equal to it. Do you think you understand?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Would you like me to repeat it?”

  “Maybe I should take notes.”

  Jasper Gwyn shook his head. Too complicated, he thought. He opened the phone again. Tom’s voice arrived. Exactly how those gadgets functioned he would never understand.

  “Tom, be quiet a second.”

  “Jasper?”

  “I want to tell you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  He told him. About the business of the refrigerator and all the rest. Tom Bruce Shepperd coughed and was silent for a few seconds, something he never did.

  The girl then went off, walking in that slightly ship-like way that fat people have of walking, but first she smiled at Jasper Gwyn as she said goodbye, with a radiant light in her eyes, with her magnificent lips, her white teeth.

  8

  Yet winter seemed pointlessly long that year, and the fact that he woke up early in the morning, sleepless, in darkness, began to offend him.

  One day, when it was cold and raining, he was sitting in the waiting room of a clinic, a number in his hand. He had persuaded the doctor to prescribe some tests—he claimed he didn’t feel well. A woman with a full shopping cart and a soaking-wet umbrella that kept falling down came and sat beside him. An old woman, with a rain scarf on her head. She took it off at some point, and in the way she smoothed her hair there was something like the remains of a seduction interrupted many years earlier. The umbrella, however, continued to fall in every direction.

  “May I help you?” asked Jasper Gwyn.

  The woman looked at him, then said that they ought to have umbrella stands in the clinics on rainy days. Someone, she added, had only to remove it when the sun returned.

  “It’s a sensible argument,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  “Of course it is,” said the woman.

  Then she took the umbrella and laid it down on the floor. It seemed like an arrow, or the edge of something. Slowly a puddle of water formed around it.

  “Are you Jasper Gwyn or just someone who looks like him?” the woman asked. She did it as she searched for something small in her purse. As her hands rummaged in it she looked up to be sure that he had heard the question.

  Jasper Gwyn wasn’t expecting it, so he said yes, he was Jasper Gwyn.

  “Bravo,” said the woman, as if he had answered a quiz question correctly. Then she said that the scene on the wharf, in Sisters, was the best thing she had read in recent years.

  “Thank you,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  “And also the fire in the school, at the beginning of the other book, the long one, the fire in the school is perfect.”

  Again she looked up at Jasper Gwyn.

  “I was a teacher,” she explained.

  Then she took two candies out of her purse, they were round, citrus-flavored, and offered one to Jasper Gwyn.

  “Thank you, no, really,” he said.

  “Come on!” she said.

  He smiled and took the candy.

  “The fact that they’re lying in the bottom of my purse doesn’t mean they’re disgusting,” she said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “But I’ve noticed that people tend to think so.”

  Jasper Gwyn thought it was just like that, people are suspicious of a candy found at the bottom of a purse.

  “I think it’s the same phenomenon that causes people to be always slightly distrustful of orphans,” he said.

  The woman turned to look at him, astonished.

  “Or the last car in the Tube,” she said, with a strange happiness in her voice.

  They were like two people who had been at school together as children, and now were reeling off the names of their classmates, bringing them back from enormous distances. A moment of silence passed between them, like a spell.

  Then they began talking, and when a nurse came and announced that it was Mr. Gwyn’s turn, Jasper Gwyn said he couldn’t right then.

  “You’ll lose your turn,” the nurse said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I can come back tomorrow.”

  “As you wish,” the nurse said coldly. Then in a loud voice she called a Mr. Flewer.

  The thing seemed totally normal to the woman with the umbrella.

  In the end they found themselves alone in the waiting room, and then the woman said that it was really time to go. Jasper Gwyn asked if she didn’t have to have a test, or something like that. But she said that she came there because it was a warm place, and it was exactly halfway between her house and the supermarket. Besides, she liked looking at the faces of people who had to have blood tests, and hadn’t eaten anything. They seem like people who’ve been robbed of something, she said. Yes, Jasper Gwyn confirmed, convinced.

  He took her home, holding the umbrel
la open over her, as she didn’t want to give up the cart, and on the way they continued to talk until the woman asked what he was writing now, and he said Nothing. The woman walked for a while in silence, then she said, “A pity.” She said it in a tone of regret so sincere that Jasper Gwyn was grieved by it.

  “No more ideas?” the woman asked.

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’d like to have another profession.”

  “Like?”

  Jasper Gwyn stopped.

  “I think I’d like to be a copyist.”

  The woman thought for a bit. Then she started walking again.

  “Yes, I can understand,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s a fine profession, copyist.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “It’s a clean profession,” she said.

  They said goodbye on the steps that led to her house, and to neither of them did it occur to exchange telephone numbers or mention a next time. Only she said that she was sorry to learn that she wouldn’t read any more books by him. She added that not everyone is capable of entering into people’s heads the way he could, and that it would be a pity to lock up that talent in the garage and polish it once a year, like a vintage sports car.

  She said just that, “like a vintage sports car.” Then she seemed to have finished, but in fact she still had something left.

  “Being a copyist has to do with copying something, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  “There. But not legal documents or numbers, please.”

  “I’ll try to avoid it.”

  “See if you find something like copying people.”

  “Yes.”

  “How they’re made.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll see them well.”

  “Yes.”

  9

  Perhaps a year, a year and a half, had passed since the article in the Guardian, when Jasper Gwyn began to feel ill, from time to time, in a way that he would describe as a sudden vanishing. He would see himself from the outside—so he related—or rather he lost every accurate perception that was not perception itself. At times it could be terrible. One day he had to go into a telephone booth and with a great effort dialed Tom’s number. He said, stammering, that he no longer knew where he was.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll send Rebecca to get you. Where are you?”

  “That’s the problem, Tom.”

  In the end the fat girl drove around the whole neighborhood until she found him. In the meantime Jasper Gwyn had stayed in the booth, spasmodically clutching the receiver and trying not to die. To distract himself he talked on the telephone—he improvised a phone call to protest the cutting off of the aqueduct, no one had informed him and it had caused enormous damage, economic and moral. He kept repeating, “Do I have to wait until it rains to shampoo my hair?”

  He immediately felt better, as soon as he got into the fat girl’s car.

  While he apologized, he couldn’t stop staring at the fat hands that gripped—but the verb wasn’t exact—the sporty steering wheel. There was no coherence, he thought, and that must be the experience that at every instant of the day the girl had of her own body—that there was no coherence between it and all the rest.

  But she smiled her lovely smile and said that in fact she was honored to be able to help him. And anyway, she added, it had happened to her, too, she had had a period when she was often ill in that way.

  “All of a sudden you thought you were dying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did you get better?” asked Jasper Gwyn, who at that point would have begged for a cure from anyone.

  The girl smiled again, then she was silent, looking at the street.

  “No,” she said finally, “that’s my business.”

  “Of course,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  They rolled. Probably that was the right verb. They rolled around the steering wheel.

  10

  In the days that followed, Jasper Gwyn tried to stay calm, and in the attempt to find a salve for the crises, which were becoming more and more frequent, he relied on an exercise that he recalled seeing in a film. It consisted of living slowly, concentrating on every single gesture. As a rule it might seem rather vague, but Jasper Gwyn had a way of observing it that made it surprisingly concrete. So when he put on his shoes he looked at them first, assessing their fine lightness and appreciating the softness of the leather. As he laced them he avoided lapsing into an automatic action and examined in detail the splendid movement of his fingers, with a rounded gesture whose assurance he admired. Then he stood up, and at the first steps he made sure to register the solid grip of the shoe on the instep. In the same way, he concentrated on noises that are usually taken for granted, hearing again the click of a lock, the hoarseness of tape, or the faintest clatter of hinges. Much time was given to registering colors, even when the object had no usefulness, and in particular he was careful to admire the random palettes produced by the placement of things—whether it was the inside of a drawer, or the area of a parking lot. Often he counted the objects he came across—steps, streetlights, shouts—and with his fingers he checked surfaces, rediscovering the infinite range between rough and smooth. He stopped to look at shadows on the ground. He felt every coin between his fingers.

  All this gave a luxurious rhythm to his daily movements, like those of an actor, or an African animal. Others seemed to recognize in his elegant slowness the natural tempo of things; and in the precision of his gestures a dominion over objects that most had forgotten returned to the surface. Jasper Gwyn wasn’t even aware of it, and yet it was very clear to him that that meticulous pacing restored to him some solidity—that center of gravity which had evidently failed.

  11

  It lasted a couple of months. Then, weary, he returned to normal living, but right away the familiar sensation of vanishing gripped him, and he was defenseless against the incurable feeling of emptiness that assailed him. Besides, that obsessive care in approaching the world—that way of tying his shoes—wasn’t, after all, very different from writing things rather than living them, from lingering over adjectives and adverbs, and so Jasper Gwyn had to admit to himself that abandoning books had produced an emptiness that he didn’t know how to remedy except by practicing imperfect and provisional substitute liturgies, like putting sentences together in his mind or tying his shoes at an idiotically slow pace. It had taken years to admit that the profession of writer had become impossible for him, and now he found himself forced to register that without that profession it was very difficult for him to go on. So in the end he realized that he was in a situation known to many humans, but not therefore less painful: that which alone makes them feel alive is something that is, slowly, fated to kill them. Children, for parents; success, for artists; mountains too high, for mountain climbers. Writing books, for Jasper Gwyn.

  Realizing this made him feel lost, and helpless the way only children are, the intelligent ones. He was surprised to feel an instinct that wasn’t habitual with him, something like the urgent necessity to talk to someone. He thought about it for a while, but the only person who came to mind was the old woman with the rain scarf, in the clinic. It would be much more natural to talk to Tom, he knew, and for a moment it even seemed possible to ask for help, in some way, from one of the women who had loved him, and who certainly would be delighted to listen to him. But the truth is that the only person with whom he really would have liked to talk about the matter was the old woman in the clinic: her, her umbrella, and her rain scarf. He was sure she would understand. So in the end Jasper Gwyn had other tests prescribed—it wasn’t hard, on the basis of his symptoms—and he went back to the waiting room where he had met her that day.

  In the hours that he spent there, waiting for her, during the three days of the tests, he carefully considered how he would explain the whole business, and although she didn’t show up, he beg
an to talk to her as if she were there, and to listen to her answers. In doing so, he understood much better what was consuming him, and once he distinctly imagined the old woman taking a little book out of her purse, an old notebook with a lot of crumbs stuck to it, probably cookies—she had opened it to look for a sentence that she had written down, and when she found it she brought her eyes close to the page, really close, and read it aloud.

  “Definitive resolutions are made always and only in a state of mind that is not destined to last.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Marcel Proust. He was never wrong, that man.”

  And she closed the notebook.

  Jasper Gwyn detested Proust, for reasons that he had never had the desire to examine, but he had saved that sentence years before, sure that someday or other it would be useful to him. Uttered by the voice of the old woman, it sounded incontrovertible. Then what should I do, he wondered.

  “Be a copyist, for heaven’s sake,” answered the woman with the rain scarf.

  “I’m not sure I know what it means.”

  “You’ll understand. When it’s right, you’ll understand.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  Coming out of the stress test, the last day, Jasper Gwyn stopped at the reception desk and asked if they had seen a rather old woman who often came there to rest.

  The young woman behind the window studied him a moment before answering.

  “She passed away.”

  She used just that phrase.

  “Several months ago,” she added.

  Jasper Gwyn stared at the young woman, bewildered.

  “Did you know her?” she asked.

  “Yes, we knew each other.”

  He turned instinctively to see if there was still an umbrella on the floor.

  “But she didn’t say anything to me,” he said.

  The young woman didn’t ask questions, probably she intended to go back to her work.

  “Maybe she didn’t know,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  When he came out he spontaneously took the route he had taken with the old woman that day in the rain: because it was all he had of her.