Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to pose nude, because I think it’s an inevitable condition for the success of the portrait.”

  This he had prepared in front of the mirror. The woman in the rain scarf had honed the words for him.

  The girl still had the cup in her hand. Every so often she brought it to her lips but without ever making the decision to drink from it.

  Jasper Gwyn took a key out of his pocket and placed it on the table.

  “What I’d like is for you to take this key and use it to enter the studio, every day at four in the afternoon. It doesn’t matter what I do, you should forget about me. Imagine that you’re alone, in there, the whole time. I ask you only to leave precisely at eight in the evening, and lock the door behind you. When we’ve finished, you’ll give me back the key. Drink your coffee, or it will get cold.”

  The girl looked at the cup she was holding as if she were seeing it for the first time. She put it down on the saucer without drinking.

  “Go on,” she said. Something had stiffened in her, somewhere.

  “I talked to Tom about it. He agreed to give you a leave for those thirty, thirty-five days, at the end of which you’ll go back to work at the agency. I know it would be a huge commitment for you, so I propose the sum of five thousand pounds to compensate you for the inconveniences it may cause and for your kindness in putting yourself at my disposal. One last thing, which is important. If you agree, you mustn’t talk about it with anyone: it’s work that I intend to carry out in the quietest possible way, and I have no interest in having the newspapers or anyone else finding out anything about it. You and Tom and I would be the only ones to know, and for me it’s extremely important that it should remain between us. There, I think I’ve told you everything. I remembered them being better, these pastries.”

  The girl smiled and turned toward the window. She watched the people passing for a moment, every so often following one with her gaze. Then she stared again at Jasper Gwyn.

  “If I do, will I be able to bring books with me?” she asked.

  Jasper Gwyn was surprised by his own answer.

  “No.”

  “Music?”

  “No. I think you should simply be with yourself, that’s all. For an entirely unreasonable time.”

  The girl nodded, she seemed to understand.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that the nudity part is pointless to discuss.”

  “Believe me, it will be more embarrassing for me than for you.”

  The girl smiled.

  “No, it’s not that…”

  She lowered her head. She smoothed some wrinkles in her skirt.

  “The last time someone asked to look at me it didn’t go very well.”

  She made a gesture with her hand, as if she were chasing something away.

  “But I’ve read your books,” she said. “You I trust.”

  Jasper Gwyn smiled at her.

  “Would you like to think about it for a few days?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward and took the key that Jasper Gwyn had placed on the table.

  “Let’s try,” she said.

  They sat in silence, with their thoughts, like a couple who have been in love for a long time and no longer need to speak.

  That night Jasper Gwyn did something ridiculous, he stood naked in front of the mirror and looked at himself for a long time. He did it because he was sure that Rebecca was doing the same thing, at her house, at that same moment.

  The next day they went together to visit the studio. Jasper Gwyn explained to her about the key and everything. He explained to her that he would work with the windows darkened by the wooden shutters and the lights turned on. He insisted that she not turn them off when she went out. He told her he had promised an old man never to do it. She didn’t ask him anything, but pointed out that there were no lights. They’re about to arrive, said Jasper Gwyn. She lay down on the bed, and stayed there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Jasper Gwyn began to arrange something upstairs, where the bathroom was: he didn’t want to be with her, in silence, in that studio, before the time was right. He came down only when he heard her steps on the wooden floor.

  Before she left Rebecca gave a last glance around.

  “Where will you be?” she asked.

  “Forget about me. I don’t exist.”

  Rebecca smiled, and made a face, as if to say yes, she understood, and sooner or later she would get used to it.

  They agreed that they could start the following Monday.

  25

  Altogether, two years, three months, and twelve days had passed since Jasper Gwyn had communicated to the world that he was going to stop writing. Whatever effect it had had on his public image, he wasn’t aware of. The mail went, by a long-standing custom, to Tom, and sometime earlier Jasper Gwyn had asked him not even to send it on, since he had stopped opening it. He rarely read newspapers, he never went on the Internet. In fact, since he had published the list of the fifty-two things he would never do again, Jasper Gwyn had slipped into an isolation that others might have interpreted as a decline but that he tended to experience as a relief. He was convinced that after twelve years of unnatural public exposure, made inevitable by his profession as a writer, he was owed a form of convalescence. He imagined, probably, that when he started to work again, in his new job as a copyist, all the pieces of his life would reawaken and would be reassembled into a newly presentable picture. So when Jasper Gwyn left the house that Monday, it was with the certainty that he was entering not simply into the first day of a new job but into a new period of his existence. This explains why, coming out, he headed resolutely toward his regular barber, with the precise intention of having his head shaved.

  He was lucky. It was closed for renovations.

  So he wasted a little time and at ten appeared in the workshop of the old man in Camden Town, the one with the light bulbs. They had settled things on the phone. The old man took from a corner an old Italian pasta box that he had sealed with wide green tape and said that it was ready. In the taxi he didn’t want to stick it in the trunk, and he held it on his legs the whole way. Given that it was quite a large box but one whose contents were obviously light, there was something eerie about the agility with which he got out of the taxi and went up the few steps that led to Jasper Gwyn’s studio.

  When he entered he stood still for a moment, without putting down the box.

  “I was here once.”

  “Do you like vintage motorcycles?”

  “I don’t even know what they are.”

  They opened the box cautiously and took out the eighteen Catherine de Médicis. They were wrapped individually in very soft tissue paper. Jasper Gwyn got the ladder he had bought from an Indian around the corner and then stepped out of the way. The old man took an unreasonably long time, by moving the ladder, and climbing up, and climbing down, but in the end he achieved the hoped-for effect of eighteen Catherine de Médicis installed in eighteen sockets hanging from the ceiling in a geometric arrangement. Even turned off they made a good show.

  “Will you turn them on?” asked Jasper Gwyn, after closing the shutters on the windows.

  “Yes, it would be better,” the old man said, as if an inexact pressure on the switch could possibly compromise everything. Probably, in his sick artisan’s mind, it did.

  He approached the electrical panel, and with his gaze fixed on his bulbs pressed the switch.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Did I tell you I wanted red?” asked Jasper Gwyn, bewildered.

  “Quiet.”

  For some reason that Jasper Gwyn was unable to understand, the light bulbs, which went on in a brilliant red color that transformed the studio into a bordello, slowly faded until they stabilized at a shade between amber and blue that could not be described as anything other than childlike.

  The old man muttered something, satisfied.

  “Incredible,” said Jasper Gwyn. He was genuinely m
oved.

  Before leaving, he turned on the system that David Barber had prepared for him, and in the big room a current of sounds began to flow that apparently dragged along, at an astonishingly slow rate, piles of dry leaves and hazy harmonies of children’s wind instruments. Jasper Gwyn gave a last glance around. It was all ready.

  “Not to pry into your business, but what do you do in here?” asked the old man.

  “I work. I’m a copyist.”

  The old man nodded. He was noticing that there was no desk in the room and, instead, a bed and two armchairs were visible. But he knew that every craftsman has his particular style.

  “I once knew someone who was a copyist” was all he said.

  They didn’t go into it further.

  They ate together, in a pub across the street. When they said goodbye, with dignified warmth, it was two forty-five. Rebecca would arrive in just a little over an hour, and Jasper Gwyn prepared to do what he had been planning, in detail, for days.

  26

  He headed toward the Underground, took the Bakerloo line, got out at Charing Cross, and for a couple of hours browsed some used-book stores, seeking, without finding, a handbook on the use of inks. By chance he bought a biography of Rebecca West, and stole an eighteenth-century anthology of haiku, hiding it in his pocket. Around five he went into a café because he needed a bathroom. At the table, drinking a whiskey, he paged through the anthology of haiku, wondering for the hundredth time what sort of mind you needed to pursue a type of beauty like that. When he realized that it was already six, he left and went to a small organic supermarket in the neighborhood, where he bought four things for dinner. Then he went to the nearest tube station, stopping to visit a Laundromat that he came across on the way: he’d been cultivating the idea of compiling a guide to the hundred best places to do your laundry in London, so he never missed an opportunity to bring himself up to date. He got home at seven twenty. He took a shower, put on a Billie Holiday record, and cooked dinner, reheating on a slow flame some lentil soup, which he buried under grated parmesan. After he ate, he left the dishes on the table and stretched out on the couch, choosing the three books that he would devote the evening to. They were a Bolaño novel, the complete Donald Duck stories by Carl Barks, and Descartes’s Discourse on Method. At least two of the three had changed the world. At nine fifteen the telephone rang. Usually Jasper Gwyn didn’t answer, but it was a special day.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, it’s Rebecca.”

  “Good evening, Rebecca.”

  A long moment of silence slid by.

  “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you. I just wanted to say that I went to the studio today.”

  “I was sure of it.”

  “Because I began to wonder if I’d got the day wrong.”

  “No, no, it was today.”

  “Okay, good, I can go to bed in peace.”

  “Certainly.”

  Another gust of silence went by.

  “I went and I did what you told me to.”

  “Very good. You didn’t turn off the lights, right?”

  “No, I left everything as it was.”

  “Perfect. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good night, Rebecca.”

  “Good night. And I’m sorry if I bothered you.”

  Jasper Gwyn went back to reading. He was in the middle of a fantastic story. Donald Duck was a traveling salesman and had been sent to the wilds of Alaska. He scaled mountains and journeyed down rivers, always carrying a sample of his wares. The great thing was the type of wares he was supposed to sell: pipe organs.

  Then he went on to Descartes.

  27

  But the next day he was there when Rebecca arrived.

  He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. In the studio David Barber’s loop was playing. A slow river.

  Rebecca greeted him with a cautious smile. Jasper Gwyn nodded. He was wearing a light jacket and had chosen for the occasion leather shoes, with laces, pale brown. They gave an impression of seriousness. Of work.

  When Rebecca began to undress he got up to reposition the shutters at one of the windows, mainly because it seemed to him inelegant to stand there watching her. She left her clothes on a chair. The last thing she took off was a black T-shirt. Under it she wore nothing. She went to sit on the bed. Her skin was very white; she had a tattoo at the base of her spine.

  Jasper Gwyn sat down again on the floor, where he had been before, and began to look. Her small breasts surprised him, and the secret moles, but it wasn’t on the details that he wanted to linger—it was more urgent to understand the whole, to bring back to some unity that figure which, for reasons to be clarified, seemed to have no coherence. He thought that without clothes it gave the impression of a random figure. He almost immediately lost the sense of time, and the simple act of observing seemed natural to him. Every so often he lowered his gaze, as another might have come back to the surface, to breathe.

  For a long time Rebecca stayed on the bed. Then Jasper Gwyn saw her get up and slowly pace the room, taking small steps. She kept her eyes on the floor, and looked for imaginary points where she could place her feet, which were like a child’s. She moved as if each time she were assembling pieces of herself that were not intended to stay together. Her body seemed to be the result of an effort of will.

  She returned to the bed. She lay down on her back, her neck resting on the pillow. She kept her eyes open.

  At eight she got dressed, and for a few minutes sat, with her raincoat on, on a chair, breathing. Then she got up and left—just a small nod of goodbye.

  For a moment Jasper Gwyn didn’t move. When he got up, he did so in order to lie down on the bed. He began to stare at the ceiling. He rested his head in the indentation in the pillow left by Rebecca.

  “How did it go?” asked the woman with the rain scarf.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s good, the girl.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s all so ridiculous.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not even sure I’ll go back myself.”

  But the next day he returned.

  28

  It occurred to him to bring a notebook. He chose one that wasn’t too small, its pages cream-colored. With a pencil, every so often he wrote down some words, then he tore out the page and fastened it with a thumbtack to the wooden floor, each time choosing a different place, like someone setting out mousetraps.

  So he wrote a sentence, at a certain point, and then he wandered around the room until he chose a point, on the floor, not far from where Rebecca was at that moment, standing, leaning against a wall. He bent over and fastened it to the wood with the thumbtack. Then he looked up at Rebecca. He had never been so close to her, since they started. Rebecca was staring into his eyes. They remained staring like that. They breathed slowly, in the river of David Barber’s sounds. Then Jasper Gwyn lowered his gaze.

  Before she left, Rebecca crossed the room and went right over to where Jasper Gwyn was huddled, sitting on the floor, in a corner. She sat down beside him, stretching out her legs and hiding her hands between her thighs, with the backs touching. She didn’t turn to look at him, she just stayed there, her head leaning against the wall. Jasper Gwyn then felt her warm closeness, and her perfume. He did so until Rebecca got up, dressed, and went out.

  Left alone, Jasper Gwyn noted something on his pieces of paper and pinned them to the floor, at points that he chose with minute attention.

  29

  Rebecca got in the habit of walking around those pieces of paper, on the days that followed, designing routes that took her from one to another, as if she were seeking the outline of some figure. She never stopped to read them, she just walked around them. Slowly Jasper Gwyn saw her change, become different in her ways of revealing herself, more unexpected in her movements. Perhaps it was the seventh day, or the eighth, when he
saw her suddenly composed into a surprising beauty, without flaw. It lasted a moment, as if she knew very well how far she had ventured, and had no intention of staying there. So she shifted her weight onto the other side, raising a hand to smooth her hair, and becoming imperfect again.

  That same day, she began to murmur, in a low voice, as she lay on the bed. Jasper Gwyn couldn’t hear the words, and didn’t want to. But she went on for many minutes, every so often smiling, or pausing in silence, and then starting up again. She seemed to be telling someone something. As she spoke she slid the palms of her hands back and forth along her extended legs. She stopped when she was silent. Without even realizing it, Jasper Gwyn approached the bed, like someone who is pursuing a small animal and ends up a few steps from its den. She didn’t react, she only lowered the tone of her voice, and continued to speak, but barely moving her lips, in a whisper that sometimes ceased, and then began again.

  The next day, while Jasper Gwyn was looking at her, her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment of transient thoughts or of memories in flight.

  If Jasper Gwyn had had to say when he began to think that there was a solution, probably he would have cited a day when, at a certain point, she put on her shirt, and it wasn’t a way of going back on some decision but of going forward beyond what she had decided. She kept it on but unbuttoned in the front—she played with the cuffs. Then something in her shifted, in a way that one might have defined as lateral, and Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that Rebecca was letting him glimpse her true portrait.