Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  “No,” said Jasper Gwyn. “I don’t believe in marriage and I’m not fit to have children.”

  “Very reasonable position. Would you begin by telling me how many square feet you need?”

  Jasper Gwyn was prepared and gave a precise answer.

  “I need a single room half as big as a tennis court.”

  John Septimus Hill didn’t turn a hair.

  “On what floor?” he asked.

  Jasper Gwyn explained that he imagined it facing on an interior garden, but he added that maybe also a top floor would work, the important thing was that it should be absolutely silent and peaceful. He would like it to have, he concluded, an uncared-for floor.

  John Septimus Hill didn’t take any notes, but seemed to be piling up in some corner of his mind all the information, as if it were ironed sheets.

  They talked about heating, bathrooms, doorman, kitchen, trim, fixtures, and parking. On every subject Jasper Gwyn demonstrated that he had clear ideas. He was categorical in stating that the space had to be empty, in fact very empty. The mere term furnished annoyed him. He tried to explain, and succeeded, that he wouldn’t mind some water stains, here and there, and maybe some pipes, preferably in a state of disrepair. He insisted on blinds and shutters on the windows, so that he could regulate the light in the room as he wished. Traces of old wallpaper on the walls he wouldn’t mind. The doors, if they were really necessary, should be of wood, possibly a bit swollen. A high ceiling, he decreed.

  John Septimus Hill piled up everything carefully, his eyes half-closed, as if he had just finished a heavy lunch, then he was silent for a bit, apparently satisfied. Finally he reopened his eyes and cleared his throat.

  “May I be permitted a question that could legitimately be called reasonably private?”

  Jasper Gwyn didn’t say yes or no. John Septimus Hill took it as encouragement.

  “You have a job that requires an absurdly high degree of precision and perfectionism, right?”

  Jasper Gwyn, without really understanding why, thought of divers. Then he answered that yes, in the past, he had done a job of that sort.

  “May I ask you what it was? It’s simply curiosity, believe me.”

  Jasper Gwyn said that for a while he had written books.

  John Septimus Hill weighed the answer, as if he were waiting to find out if he could understand it without greatly disturbing his own convictions.

  17

  Ten days later, John Septimus Hill took Jasper Gwyn to a low factory building, at the back of a garden, behind Marylebone High Street. For years it had been a carpenter’s storeroom. Then, in rapid succession, it had been the warehouse for an art gallery, the offices of a travel magazine, and the garage of a collector of vintage motorcycles. Jasper Gwyn found it perfect. He much appreciated the indelible oil stains left by the motorcycles on the wooden floor and the edges of posters showing Caribbean seas that no one had troubled to take off the walls. There was a small bathroom on the roof, reached by an iron stairway. There was no trace of a kitchen. The big windows could be blocked by massive wooden shutters, just redone and not yet painted. One entered the big room by a double door that opened onto the garden. There were also pipes visible, which were not in good shape. John Septimus Hill noted, in a professional tone, that for the water stains it wouldn’t be hard to find a solution.

  “Although it’s the first time,” he observed without irony, “that dampness has been mentioned to me as a hoped-for decoration, rather than a disaster.”

  They settled on a price, and Jasper Gwyn agreed to it for six months, reserving the right to renew the contract for six more. The figure was substantial, and this helped him realize that if it had ever been a game, that business of the portraits, it was so no longer.

  “Good, my son will take care of the practical details,” said John Septimus Hill as they parted. They were on the street, in front of a tube station. “Don’t take this as a polite observation,” he added, “but it’s been a real pleasure to do business with you.”

  Jasper Gwyn wasn’t good at farewells, even in their lightest form, like a goodbye from a real-estate broker who had just found him a former garage in which to attempt to write portraits. But he also felt a sincere liking for this man, and he wanted to be able to express it. So, instead of saying something generically nice, he murmured something that amazed even him.

  “I didn’t always write books,” he said. “Before that I had another profession. I did it for nine years.”

  “Really?”

  “I was a tuner. I tuned pianos. The same profession as my father.”

  John Septimus Hill took in the information with evident satisfaction.

  “There. Now I think I understand better. Thank you.”

  Then he said there was something he had always wondered about tuners.

  “I’ve always wondered if they know how to play the piano. Professionally, I mean.”

  “Seldom,” answered Jasper Gwyn. “And yet,” he continued, “if the question you have in mind is how in the world, after working for hours, they refrain from sitting down right there to play a polonaise by Chopin, so as to enjoy the result of their dedication and knowledge, the answer is that, even if they were able to, they never would.”

  “No?”

  “A man who tunes a piano doesn’t like to untune it,” Jasper Gwyn explained.

  They parted, promising to meet again.

  Days later, Jasper Gwyn was sitting on the floor in a corner of a former garage that was now his portrait studio. He turned the key over in his hands, and examined the distances, the light, the details. There was a great silence, broken only by the sporadic gurgling of the water pipes. He sat there for a long time, analyzing his next moves. He would have to put something there—a bed, maybe, some chairs. He thought of how to light it, and where he would be. He tried to imagine himself there, in the silent company of a stranger, both of them surrendered to a time about which they would have to learn everything. He already felt the grip of an uncontrollable embarrassment.

  “I’ll never do it,” he said at one point.

  “Come on,” said the lady with the rain scarf. “Have a whiskey if you’ve really got cold feet.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Double whiskey, then.”

  “You make it seem easy.”

  “What’s the matter, are you afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. If there’s no fear you can’t accomplish anything good. And the water stains?”

  “It seems that I just have to wait. The heating pipes are disgusting.”

  “You’re reassuring me.”

  The next day Jasper Gwyn decided to think about the music. All that silence made an impression, and he had reached the conclusion that he had to give the room a lining of sound. The gurgling of the pipes was fine, but it was obvious that he could do better.

  18

  He had known many composers, in the years when he tuned pianos, but the one who came to mind was David Barber. It was logical: Jasper Gwyn distinctly recalled a composition of his for clarinet, fan, and plumbing pipes. It wasn’t even so bad. The pipes gurgled a lot.

  For years they had been out of touch, but when Jasper Gwyn gained a certain fame David Barber had sought him out to propose that he write the text for a cantata. He hadn’t done anything about it (it was a cantata for recorded voice, seltzer siphon, and string orchestra), but the two had remained in contact. David was a likable fellow, his hobby was hunting, and he lived in the midst of dogs, all of whom were named for pianists, something that allowed Jasper Gwyn to declare, without lying, that he had once been bitten by Radu Lupu. As a composer David had for a long time enjoyed hanging out with the more festive wing of the New York avant-garde: he didn’t make much money, but success with women was assured. Then for a long period he had disappeared, following certain esoteric ideas he had about tonal relationships and teaching what he apparently had learned in various university-type circles. The last Jasper
Gwyn had heard of him was when, in the papers, he had read about a symphony performed, unconventionally, at Old Trafford, the famous stadium in Manchester. The title of the work, ninety minutes long, was Semifinal.

  Without too much effort he found the address, and appeared one morning at his house, in Fulham. When David Barber opened the door and saw him, he gave him a big hug, as if he had been expecting him. Then they went to the park together, to take Martha Argerich to shit. He was a spinone from the Vendée.

  19

  There was no need to beat around the bush with David, and so Jasper Gwyn said simply that he needed something to use as a soundtrack for his new studio. He said he wasn’t capable of working in silence.

  “You never thought of some good records?” David Barber asked.

  “That’s music. I want sounds.”

  “Sounds or noises?”

  “You didn’t use to think there was a difference.”

  They went on talking, walking in the park, while Martha Argerich chased squirrels. Jasper Gwyn said that what he imagined was a very long, barely perceptible loop that would just cover the silence, muffling it.

  “How long is very long?” asked David Barber.

  “I don’t know. Fifty hours?”

  David Barber stopped. He laughed.

  “Well, it’s no joke. It will cost you a certain amount, my friend.”

  Then he said that he wanted to see the place. And think about it a little, while sitting there. So they decided to go together to the studio behind Marylebone High Street the next morning. They spent the rest of the time recalling days gone by, and at one point David Barber said that for a while, years earlier, he’d been certain that Jasper had gone to bed with his girlfriend. She was some sort of Swedish photographer. No, it’s she who went to bed with me, said Jasper Gwyn, I didn’t understand a thing. They laughed about it.

  The next day David Barber arrived in a broken-down station wagon that smelled of wet dog even from a distance. He parked in front of a hydrant, because it was his personal way of protesting the government’s management of cultural funds. They went into the studio and closed the door behind them. There was a great silence, apart from the gurgling pipes, naturally.

  “Nice,” said David Barber.

  “Yes.”

  “You should pay attention to those water stains.”

  “It’s all under control.”

  David Barber wandered around the room for a while, and took the measure of that particular silence. He listened attentively to the pipes, and assessed the squeaking of the wooden floor.

  “Maybe I should also know what type of book you’re writing,” he said.

  Jasper Gwyn had a moment of discomfort. He wasn’t yet used to the idea that it would take a lifetime to convince the world that he was no longer writing. It was an astonishing phenomenon. Once an editor he met on the street had complimented him warmly on his article in the Guardian. Immediately afterward he had asked, “What are you writing now?” These were things that Jasper Gwyn wasn’t able to understand.

  “Believe me, what I’m writing isn’t important,” he said.

  And he explained that what he wanted was a background of sound that would change like light during the day, and thus imperceptibly and continuously. Above all: elegant. This was very important. He added that he wanted something in which there was no trace of rhythm, but only a becoming that would suspend time, and simply fill the space with a journey that had no coordinates. He said he would like something as motionless as a face that is aging.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” David Barber asked.

  When he returned he said that he accepted.

  “Ten thousand pounds plus the sound system. Let’s say twenty thousand pounds.”

  Jasper Gwyn liked the thought that he was using up all his savings gambling on a profession whose existence he wasn’t even sure of. He wanted somehow to put his back to the wall, because he knew that only then would he have a chance to find, in himself, what he was seeking. So he agreed.

  A month later David Barber came to install the sound system and then he left Jasper Gwyn a hard disk.

  “Enjoy it. It’s seventy-two hours, it came out a little long. I couldn’t find the ending.”

  That night Jasper Gwyn lay down on the floor, in his copyist’s studio, and started the loop. It began with what seemed a sound of leaves and continued on, moving imperceptibly, and coming upon sounds of every type as if by chance. Tears came to Jasper Gwyn’s eyes.

  20

  During the month while he was waiting for David Barber’s music, or whatever it was, Jasper Gwyn had been busy refining other details. He had begun with the furniture. In the warehouse of a junk shop on Regent Street he had found three chairs and an iron bed, rather beat-up, but with a certain style. He had added two shabby leather armchairs the color of cricket balls. He rented two enormous and expensive carpets and bought at an unreasonable price a wall coatrack that came from a French brasserie. At one point he was tempted by a horse from an eighteenth-century merry-go-round and then he realized that things were getting out of hand.

  One thing he couldn’t immediately focus on was how he would write, whether standing or sitting at a desk, on a computer, by hand, on big sheets of paper, or in small notebooks. He still had to find out if in fact he was going to write, or if he would confine himself to observing and thinking, then, later, maybe at home, assembling what had occurred to him. For painters it was simple, they had the canvas in front of them—that wasn’t strange. But someone who wished, instead, to write? He could hardly be sitting at a table, in front of a computer. He finally realized that anything would be ridiculous except to start work and discover on the spot, at the right moment, what it made sense to do and what it didn’t. So no desk, no laptop, not even a pencil the first day, he decided. He allowed himself only a modest shoe rack, to place in a corner: he imagined that he would like, each time, to be able to put on the shoes that that day seemed to him most fitting.

  Occupied by all these things, he had immediately felt better, and for a while he no longer had to keep at bay the crises that had afflicted him for months. When he felt the sensation of disappearing, whose arrival he had come to recognize, he refused to get frightened and concentrated on his thousands of tasks, carrying them out with an even more maniacal scrupulousness. In attention to the details he found instant relief. This led him, at times, to reach almost literary peaks of perfectionism. He happened, for example, to find himself in the presence of an artisan who made light bulbs. Not lamps: bulbs. He made them by hand. He was an old man with a gloomy workshop in the neighborhood of Camden Town. Jasper Gwyn had looked for him for a long time without even knowing whether he existed, and had finally found him. What he intended to ask him for was not only a very particular light—childish, he would explain—but, in particular, a light that would last for a certain predetermined time. He wanted bulbs that would go out after thirty-two days.

  “All at once or suffering death throes?” asked the old man, as if he were thoroughly acquainted with the problem.

  21

  The matter of the light bulbs may seem of dubious relevance, but for Jasper Gwyn it had, instead, become a crucial issue. It had to do with time. Although he still hadn’t the least idea of what the act of writing a portrait could be, he had come up with a certain idea of its possible duration—as it is possible to decipher the distance and not the identity of a man walking at night. He had immediately dismissed something rapid, but it was also hard to imagine an action whose ending was random and possibly very far off. So he had begun to measure—lying on the floor, in the studio, in absolute solitude—the weight of the hours and the texture of the days. He had in mind a journey, similar to what he had seen in the paintings that day, and he intended to work out the pace at which it could be made, and the length of the road that would bring it to a destination. He had to identify the speed at which embarrassments would dissolve and the slowness with which some truth would rise to the surface. He
realized that, as in life, only a certain punctuality could make that act complete—as it makes some moments of the living happy.

  In the end he had decided that thirty-two days might represent a first, credible approximation. He determined that he would try one work session a day, for thirty-two days, four hours a day. And here was the importance of the light bulbs.

  The fact is that he couldn’t imagine something that stopped abruptly, at the end of the last sitting, in a bureaucratic and impersonal way. It was obvious that the end of the work would have to be an elegant process, perhaps poetic, and possibly unpredictable. Then he found the solution he had been working on for the light—eighteen bulbs hanging from the ceiling, at regular intervals, in a perfect geometry—and he imagined that around the thirty-second day those bulbs would begin to go out one by one, randomly, but all in an interval of time that was no less than two days and no more than a week. He saw the studio glide into darkness, in patches, following an arbitrary pattern, and he fantasized about how they would move around, he and the model, in order to make use of the last lights, or, on the contrary, to take refuge in the first dark places. He saw himself distinctly in the weak light of a last bulb giving belated touches to the portrait. And then accepting the darkness, at the dying of the last filament.

  It’s perfect, he thought.

  That was why he found himself in the presence of the old man, in Camden Town.

  “No, they should just die, without agonizing, and without any noise, if possible.”

  The old man made one of those indecipherable gestures that artisans make to revenge themselves on the world. Then he explained that light bulbs were not easy creatures, they were affected by a lot of variables and often had their own, unpredictable form of madness.

  “Usually,” he added, “the client at this point says, ‘Like women.’ Spare me, please.”