Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  42

  He was in a new Laundromat that some Pakistanis had opened behind his house when a boy in a jacket and tie approached; he couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  “Are you Jasper Gwyn?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are,” said the boy, and handed him a cell phone. “It’s for you.”

  Jasper Gwyn took it, resigned. But also somewhat glad.

  “Hey, Tom.”

  “You know how many days since I’ve phoned you, big brother?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Forty-one.”

  “A record.”

  “You can say that again. How’s the Laundromat?”

  “Just opened, you know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t know, Lottie does the washing.”

  They had an open bet, and so after tossing a lot of nonsense back and forth they reached it. It was the question of the portrait.

  “Rebecca doesn’t cough up anything, so it’s up to you to tell, Jasper. I want the details, too.”

  “Here in the Laundromat?”

  “Why not?”

  In fact there was no reason not to talk about it. Apart from that boy in the jacket and tie, perhaps, who remained, stiffly, in the way. Jasper Gwyn gave him a look and he understood. He went out of the Laundromat.

  “I did it. It came out well.”

  “The portrait?”

  “Yes.”

  “It came out well in what sense?”

  Jasper Gwyn wasn’t sure he could explain it. He felt like getting up—maybe if he paced back and forth he could do it.

  “I didn’t know exactly what it might mean to write a portrait, and now I do. There’s a way of doing it that has a meaning. Then maybe it’s more successful or less, but it’s a thing that exists. It’s not only in my head.”

  “What the hell kind of trick did you come up with, can you tell me?”

  “No trick, it’s very simple. But in fact it doesn’t occur to you until it occurs to you.”

  “Very clear.”

  “Come on, someday I’ll explain it better.”

  “Well, tell me at least one thing.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “When do we give that fine studio back to John Septimus Hill and sign a nice contract?”

  “Never, I think.”

  Tom was silent for a moment, and that wasn’t a good sign.

  “I found what I was looking for, Tom, it’s good news.”

  “Not for your agent!”

  “I’ll never write any more books, Tom, and you’re not my agent, you’re my friend, and I also think you’re the only one, actually.”

  “Am I supposed to burst into tears?”

  He felt that he was irritated, but he didn’t say it maliciously, it was only embarrassment or something like that. Am I supposed to burst into tears?

  “Come on, Tom.”

  Tom was thinking that this time he couldn’t straighten things out.

  “And now?” he asked.

  “Now what?”

  “What happens now, Jasper?”

  There was a long silence. Then Jasper Gwyn said something that Tom, however, couldn’t understand.

  “Speak into the telephone, Jasper!”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  It was true up to a certain point. He had had some ideas, even quite detailed ones. Maybe there were parts missing, but he had, stamped in his mind, a hypothesis on how to proceed.

  “I imagine I’ll start making portraits,” he simplified.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’ll find clients and make their portraits.”

  Tom Bruce Shepperd put the receiver down on the table and backed up his wheelchair. He left his office, turned with surprising skill into the corridor, and went along it until he was in front of the open door of the room where Rebecca worked. What he had to say he shouted, without ceremony.

  “Will you tell me what the fuck that man has in mind and what he wants to accomplish, and, above all, why—why he has to invent all that nonsense simply in order not to do what…”

  He realized that Rebecca wasn’t there.

  “Fuck.”

  He turned around and went back to his office. He picked up the phone.

  “Jasper?”

  “I’m here.”

  Tom searched for a calm tone of voice and found it.

  “I’m not letting you go,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Certainly, but it doesn’t come to mind now.”

  “Take your time.”

  “All right.”

  “You know where to find me.”

  “You, too.”

  “In the Laundromat.”

  “For example.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Jasper, do you think people who make portraits have an agent?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  But then, for days and weeks, they didn’t return to the subject, because they knew that this business of the portraits was distancing them, and so they ended up circling around it, without ever approaching the heart of the matter, fearful that doing so would inevitably drive them further apart, opening them up to a suffering that they didn’t want to inherit.

  43

  A couple of days after that phone call with Tom, Jasper Gwyn met Rebecca—the weather was mild, and it occurred to him to make the date in Regent’s Park, on that path where, in a sense, it had begun. He had brought the folder with the seven printed pages. He sat waiting on a bench with which he had a certain familiarity.

  They hadn’t seen each other since that last light bulb, in the dark. Rebecca arrived, and they had to figure out what point to start over from.

  “Sorry to be late. Someone committed suicide on the Underground.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No, I was late and that’s all. I’m sorry.”

  She was wearing fishnet stockings. You could barely see them, under the long skirt. The ankles, and that was all. But they were fishnet. Jasper Gwyn also noticed rather spectacular earrings. She didn’t wear things like that when she handed over cell phones in Laundromats.

  “Do you like Klarisa Rode?” he asked, pointing to the book that Rebecca was holding.

  “Tremendously. It’s Tom who told me about her. She must have been an extraordinary woman. You know that none of her books were published while she was alive? She didn’t want them to be.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And for at least seventy years nothing more was known about them. They were rediscovered only about ten years ago. Have you read them?”

  Jasper Gwyn hesitated a moment.

  “No.”

  “Too bad. You should.”

  “You’ve read them all?”

  “Well, there are just two. But, you know, in these cases stuff continues to come out of the drawers for years, so I’m confident.”

  They laughed.

  Jasper Gwyn kept staring at the book so Rebecca asked him, joking, if he had invited her there to talk about books.

  “No, no, sorry,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  He seemed to chase something out of his thoughts. “I asked to see you because I had this to give you,” he said.

  He took the folder and gave it to her.

  “It’s your portrait,” he said.

  She made a move as if to take it, but Jasper Gwyn held on to it because he wanted to add something.

  “Would you do me the kindness of reading it here, in front of me? Do you think it’s possible? It would be helpful to me.”

  Rebecca took the folder.

  “I stopped saying no to you a long time ago. Can I open it?”

  “Yes.”

  She did it slowly. She counted the pages. She ran her fingers over the first one, as i
f she were enjoying the texture of the paper.

  “Have you let anyone else read it?”

  “No.”

  “I counted on that, thank you.”

  She placed the pages on top of the closed folder.

  “Shall I go ahead?” she asked.

  “When you like.”

  Around them were children running, dogs pulling in the direction of home, and old couples with an air of having escaped something terrifying. Their lives, probably.

  Rebecca read slowly, with a mild concentration that Jasper Gwyn appreciated. A single expression on her face the whole time: just the hint of a smile, unmoving. When she finished one page she slid it under the others. Hesitating just an instant, while she was reading the first lines of the next page. When she reached the end she sat for a while, with the portrait in her hands, looking up at the park. Without saying anything she went back to the pages and began to skim them, stopping here and there, re-reading. Every so often she compressed her lips, as if something had pricked her, or grazed her. She put the pages in order, finally, and returned them to the folder. She closed it with the tie. It was still resting on her knees.

  “How do you do it?” she asked. Her eyes were bright with tears.

  Jasper Gwyn took back the folder, but gently, as if it were understood that it had to be like that.

  Then they talked for a long time, and Jasper Gwyn was pleased to explain more things than he would have expected. Rebecca asked, but carefully, as if she were opening something fragile—or an unexpected letter. They talked at their own pace, and there was no longer anything else around them. Every so often, between one question and the next, came an empty silence, in which both measured how much they were willing to find out, or to explain, without losing the pleasure of a certain mystery, which they knew was indispensable. At a question more inquisitive than the others Jasper Gwyn smiled and answered with a gesture—the palm of a hand passing over Rebecca’s eyes, as when one says good night to a child.

  “I’ll keep it all to myself,” Rebecca said at the end.

  She couldn’t know that it wouldn’t be like that.

  44

  They stayed a while longer, there, on the bench, while the park grew dim. For several days Jasper Gwyn had been pondering a particular idea and now he wondered if Rebecca would like to hear it.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Jasper Gwyn hesitated briefly, then he said what he had in mind.

  “I’ll need some help, to get my new work going. And I thought that no one could help me better than you.”

  “Meaning?”

  Jasper Gwyn explained to her that there were a lot of practical things to arrange, and he couldn’t really imagine looking for clients, or choosing them, or something like that. Not to mention the price, and the ways of defining and collecting it. He said he absolutely needed someone to do all that for him.

  “I know that the most logical solution would be Tom, but it’s hard now for me to talk to him about it, I don’t think he wants to understand. I need someone who believes in it, who knows it’s all real and makes sense.”

  Rebecca listened, surprised.

  “You want me to work for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “For this business of the portraits?”

  “Yes. You’re the only person in the world who really knows what they are.”

  Rebecca shook her head. That man certainly liked to complicate her life. Or resolve it, who knows.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “A minute. Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  She got up, left the book by Klarisa Rode to Jasper Gwyn, and headed toward a kiosk that sold ice cream, farther along the path. She got a cone with two scoops, which wasn’t very easy, because she couldn’t find her wallet. She returned to the bench and sat down again next to Jasper Gwyn. She held out the cone.

  “Would you like a taste?” she asked.

  Jasper Gwyn shook his head no, he didn’t, and from far away the candies of the woman in the rain scarf came back to him.

  “First I have to explain something to you,” said Rebecca. “I left the house in order to explain it, and now I’ll explain it to you. If you want to continue to make portraits, it will be useful to you.”

  She stopped a moment to lick the cone.

  “In that studio everything is illogically easy, or at least it was for me. Seriously, you’re in there, and there’s nothing that after a moment does not become, in some sense, natural. It’s all easy. Except for the end. That’s the thing I wanted to tell you. If you want my opinion, the end is horrendous. I also asked myself why, and now I think I know.”

  She was careful not to let the ice cream drip; every so often she glanced at it.

  “It might seem stupid to you, but at the end I would have expected you to at least hug me.”

  She said it like that, very simply.

  “Maybe I would have liked to make love with you, there, in the darkness, but certainly I would have expected at least to end up in your arms, in some way, to touch you, touch you.”

  Jasper Gwyn was about to say something, but she stopped him with a wave of her hand.

  “Look, don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not in love with you, I don’t think—it’s something else, and it has to do just with that particular moment, that darkness and that moment. I don’t know if I can explain it, but all those days when you are basically your body and almost nothing else… all those days set up a kind of expectation that something physical should happen, at the end. Something that rewards you. A distance that’s filled in, I’d like to say. You fill it in by writing, but I? We? All the people who’ll have their portraits done? You’ll send them home as you sent me, at the same distance as there was the first day? Well, it’s not a good idea.”

  She glanced at the ice cream.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, but they’ll all feel the same thing I felt.”

  She tidied up the dripping ice cream.

  “Someday you’ll write a portrait for an old man, and it won’t make any difference, at the end that man will look for a way to touch you—against any logic or desire, he’ll feel the need to touch you. He’ll come over and run a hand through your hair, or shake your arm hard, even just that, but he’ll have a need to do it.”

  She looked up at Jasper Gwyn.

  “Well, let him do it. In some way you owe it to him.”

  She had reached the crunchy part, the cone.

  “It’s the best part,” she noted.

  Jasper Gwyn let her finish, then asked if she would work for him. But in a tone in which he might have said that he was charmed by her.

  Rebecca thought that this man loved her, only he didn’t know it, and would never know it.

  “Of course I’ll work for you,” she said. “If you promise to keep your hands to yourself. I’m joking. Give me back the Rode, or do you want to keep it and read it?”

  Jasper Gwyn seemed on the point of saying something, but then he simply gave her the book.

  Three weeks later, in some journals carefully chosen by Rebecca, an advertisement appeared that, after many attempts and lengthy discussions, Jasper Gwyn had decided to reduce to three clear words.

  Writer executes portraits.

  As a reference it gave only a post-office box.

  It won’t work, the lady in the rain scarf would have said.

  But the world is strange and the advertisement worked.

  45

  The first portrait Jasper Gwyn made was for a man of sixty-three who all his life had sold antique timepieces. He had been married three times, and the last time he had had the bright idea of remarrying his first wife. He had asked her only not to speak of it ever again. Now he had stopped selling grandfather clocks and silver pocket watches, and went around with a multifunction Casio he had bought from a Pakistani on the street. He lived in Brighton, and had three children. The entire time he was in the studio, he walked, and not once, in the thirty-four days of his sojourn in David Barber’s sound clou
d, did he use the bed. When he was tired, he sat in an armchair. He would often start talking, but in an undertone, to himself. One of the few sentences that Jasper Gwyn understood, without, however, wanting to, went like this: “If you don’t believe it you have only to go and ask him about it.” On the twelfth day he asked if he could smoke, but then he realized that it wouldn’t be right. Jasper Gwyn saw him change, over time: the way he carried his shoulders was different, and his hands were freer, as if someone had given them back to him. When the time came to talk, he did it with precision and pleasure, sitting on the floor next to Jasper Gwyn, his hands resting with well-feigned modesty on his sex. The questions didn’t surprise him, and he answered the most difficult after reflecting for a long time, but also as if he had had the right words ready for years: When I was a child and my mother went out in the evening, stylish, very beautiful, he said. When I wound the clocks, in the morning, in my shop, and every time I went to sleep, every blessed time.

  When the last light bulb went out, he was lying on the floor, and in the dark Jasper Gwyn, with some irritation, heard him crying, in a rather undignified way but without embarrassment. He went up to him and said, Thank you, Mr. Trawley. Then he helped him get up. Mr. Trawley leaned on his arm and with one hand sought Jasper Gwyn’s face. Maybe he had in mind a caress; what resulted was a hug, and for the first time Jasper Gwyn felt the skin of a man against his own.

  Mr. Trawley got his portrait in exchange for fifteen thousand pounds and a declaration in which he pledged the most absolute discretion, on the pain of heavy pecuniary sanctions. At home, while his wife was out, he turned out all the lights but one, opened the folder, and slowly read the six pages that Jasper Gwyn had prepared for him. The next day he sent a letter in which he thanked him and said that he was fully satisfied. The last line said, “I can’t not think that if all this had happened many years ago I would be today a different and, in many respects, better man. Sincerely yours, Mr. Andrew Trawley.”

  46

  The second portrait Jasper Gwyn made was for a woman of forty, single, who after studying architecture was now occupied with an import-export business with India. Fabrics, handicrafts, occasionally the work of an artist. She lived with an Italian woman, in a loft on the outskirts of London. Jasper Gwyn made an effort to convince her that it wasn’t suitable to keep her cell phone on and to arrive late every day. She learned quickly, and without apparent irritation. It was evident that she very much liked being naked and being looked at. She was thin, as if her body had been consumed by some unmet expectation, and had dark skin that had bright, animal highlights. She was loaded with bracelets, necklaces, rings, which she never took off and which she changed every day. After ten days Jasper Gwyn asked if she could come without all that junk on (he didn’t describe it in those terms) and she said she would try. The next day she was completely naked, with the exception of a silver ankle bracelet. When it came time to talk she couldn’t do it without pacing back and forth, and gesticulating as if words were always imprecise and needed an apparatus of physical footnotes. Jasper Gwyn ventured to ask her if she had ever been in love with a woman and she said Never but then she added, Do you want the truth? Jasper Gwyn said that there was rarely one truth.