Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  “The key,” she said.

  The girl looked in her purse and placed the key on the table. She looked at her for a moment.

  “I don’t want the portrait,” she said. “Throw it away.”

  She left the door open behind her—she walked at a slight angle, as if she had to fit into a narrow space and were doing so in order to flee everything in existence.

  57

  It took Rebecca some time to recover her thoughts. She ignored the duties that she should have performed, she cancelled all her appointments, she left on the table, without opening them, the newspapers she had bought. It annoyed her to see that her hands were trembling—it was even hard to know if it was rage or some form of fear. The telephone rang and she didn’t answer. She picked up her things and left.

  On the way home, she sat down in a tranquil place, on the steps of a church, at the edge of a small garden, and forced herself to remember the girl’s words. She tried to understand what, each time, they had shattered. Many things: some that she knew were delicate but also solid, the way simple illusions are not. Oddly, she thought of Jasper Gwyn before she thought of herself, like someone who, getting up from a fall, checks to be sure that his glasses aren’t smashed, or his watch—the most fragile things. It was an effort to figure out how much that girl had wounded him. Certainly she had violated a boundary that up to that moment Jasper Gwyn had chosen as an unbreakable rule of his curious work. But it was also possible that so much attention given to placing limits and restrictions concealed in him the inner desire to go beyond every rule, even just once, and at whatever price—as if to get to the end of a particular path. Therefore it was hard to say if the girl had been a mortal blow or the end toward which all his portraits had been directed. Who knows. Certainly those nine days without setting foot in the studio made one think of a man who was frightened rather than of one who had arrived—and the fact that he remained hidden, calm but determined. Wounded animals move like that. She thought of the studio, of the eighteen Catherine de Médicis, of the music of David Barber. What a pity, she said to herself. What an immense pity if it should all end here.

  She went home, walking slowly, and only then did it occur to her to think of herself, to check her own wounds. Although it disgusted her to admit it, that girl had taught her something that was humiliating, and that had to do with courage, or shamelessness, who knows. She tried to remember the moments when she, too, had been truly close to Jasper Gwyn, outrageously close, and in the end asked herself what she had done wrong at those moments, or what she hadn’t understood. She went back in memory to the darkness of the studio, the last night, and recalled the nothing that remained between them, incredulous that she had been unable to span it. But even more she thought of the morning when Tom died, her running to Jasper Gwyn and what followed. She recalled their fear, and the wish to stay shut up there, together, stronger than anything else. She recalled her own movements in the kitchen, her bare feet, the telephone that rang as they went on talking, in low voices. The alcohol drunk, the old records, the book covers, confusion in the bathroom. And how easy it had been to lie beside him, and sleep. Then the difficult dawn, and the frightened gaze of Jasper Gwyn. She who understood and left.

  How much more precise the sharp gesture of that girl had been.

  What an odious lesson.

  She looked at herself and wondered if everything couldn’t be explained simply by her body, unsuitable and wrong. But there was no answer. Only a sadness that for a long time she hadn’t wanted to face.

  At home, later, she saw in the mirror that she was beautiful—and alive.

  For days, therefore, she did the only thing that seemed to her appropriate—waiting. She followed coldly the increasing number of newspaper stories that took up the odd case of Jasper Gwyn, and confined herself to filing them away, in chronological order. She answered the telephone, noting diligently all the requests and assuring callers that soon she would be able to be more useful. She wasn’t afraid, she knew that she had only to wait. She did it for eleven days. Then, one morning, a large package arrived in the office, accompanied by a letter and a book.

  In the package were all the portraits, each in its folder. In the letter Jasper Gwyn explained that they were the copies he had made for himself: he begged her to keep them in a safe place, and not to make them public in any way. He added a detailed list of things to do: give back the studio to John Septimus Hill, get rid of the furniture and the fixtures, clear out the office, cancel the e-mail they had used for work, make herself unavailable to journalists who might try to get in touch with her. He specified that he had personally taken care of settling all the outstanding bills, and reassured Rebecca that what she was owed would reach her as soon as possible, including a significant bonus. He was sure she wouldn’t have any problems.

  He thanked her warmly, and he was anxious to say yet again that he could not have wished for a colleague more precise, discreet, and pleasant. He realized that a warmer farewell might have been hoped for in every way, but he had to confess, with regret, that he couldn’t do better.

  The rest of the letter was written by hand. It said:

  Perhaps I should explain to you that the distance from that girl was an insoluble theorem: I couldn’t do it without making myself ridiculous, or without wounding her, perhaps. The first thing doesn’t matter to me, but the second would cause me infinite disappointment. Please believe simply that it couldn’t be done otherwise.

  Don’t worry about me, I’m not bothered by what happened and I have in mind precisely what I have to do now.

  I wish for you every happiness, you deserve it.

  Forever grateful, yours,

  Jasper Gwyn, copyist

  Then, after the signature, there was a note of a few lines. He said that he was enclosing the last book to come from the drawers of Klarisa Rode, which had just been published. He remembered clearly how that day in the park, when he brought her the portrait, she had been carrying a novel of Rode’s and had spoken of it with great enthusiasm. So it had occurred to him that in the circumstances giving her the book might be a good way of coming full circle: he hoped that reading it would give her pleasure.

  Nothing else.

  But can a person be made like that? Rebecca thought.

  She took the book, she turned it over in her hands, then she threw it against the wall—a gesture that she would remember some years later.

  It occurred to her to look on the package and she found only a generic London postmark. Where Jasper Gwyn had gone she was evidently not to know. Far—that she felt with absolute certainty. It was all over, and without that solemnity that the sunset of things should always have the right to.

  She got up, she put Jasper Gwyn’s letter in her appointment book, and she decided that, for the last time, she would do what he had asked. Not out of duty—out of a form of melancholy precision. She took the portraits with her when she left. She thought that not reading them would be one of the pleasures of her life. When she got home, she put them at the bottom of a closet, under some old sweaters, and this was the last act that caused her some regret—to know that no one would ever know.

  It took her ten days to arrange everything. To those who asked for explanations, she gave vague answers. When John Septimus Hill asked her to give Jasper Gwyn his respectful greetings, she explained that she had no way of doing so.

  “Ah, no?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t think you’ll see him in a reasonable amount of time?”

  “I don’t imagine seeing him ever again,” said Rebecca.

  John Septimus Hill allowed himself a vaguely skeptical smile that Rebecca considered out of place.

  58

  In the years that followed, no one had any news, apparently, of Jasper Gwyn. The gossip about that peculiar obsession with the portraits slipped quickly out of the newspapers, and his name appeared less and less frequently in the literary news. It might be cited in ephemeral charts of recent E
nglish literature, and a couple of times he was mentioned in relation to other books that seemed to take up certain of his stylistic habits. One of his novels, Sisters, ended up on the list of “One Hundred Books to Read Before You Die” drawn up by an authoritative literary review. His English publisher and a couple of foreign publishers tried to get in touch with him, but in the past everything had been handled by Tom, and now, with his agency closed, there seemed to be no way to talk to that man. The feeling that sooner or later he would appear, and probably with a new book, was fairly widespread. Few thought that he could have truly stopped writing.

  As for Rebecca, in the space of four years she reconstructed a life, choosing to start from the beginning. She had found a job that had nothing to do with books, she had left the shit boyfriend and had gone to live just outside London. One day she had met a married man who had a wonderful way of making a mess of everything he touched. His name was Robert. In the end they fell in love, and one day the man asked her if he might perhaps leave his family and try to make another one with her. It seemed an excellent idea to Rebecca. At the age of thirty-two she became the mother of a girl to whom they gave the name Emma. She began to work less and get fatter, and she regretted neither of the two. She very seldom thought of Jasper Gwyn, and always without particular emotion. They were faint memories, like postcards sent from a previous life.

  Yet one day, while she was pushing Emma in her stroller down the aisles of an enormous London bookshop, she came across a special offer on paperbacks, and at the top of a pile she saw a book by Klarisa Rode. At the moment she didn’t notice the title, she simply took in the fact that she had never read it. Only at the cash register did she realize that it was, in fact, the book that four years earlier Jasper Gwyn had given her, the day when everything ended. She recalled what she had done with it. She smiled. She paid.

  She began to read in the Underground, since Emma had fallen asleep in the stroller, and they had quite a few stops to go. She was really enjoying it, oblivious of all the people around, when suddenly, on page sixteen, she was dumbstruck. She read a little further, in disbelief. Then she looked up and said, aloud, “Look at this son of a bitch!”

  In fact what she was reading, in Klarisa Rode’s book, was her own portrait, word for word, exactly the portrait that Jasper Gwyn had made for her, years earlier.

  She turned to her neighbor and in a surreal way felt bound to explain, also aloud: “He copied it, he copied it from Rode, shit!”

  Her neighbor didn’t seem to grasp the importance of the thing, but meanwhile something had started up in Rebecca’s head—like a form of delayed common sense—and she lowered her gaze to the book again.

  Just a minute, she thought.

  She checked the publication date and realized that something didn’t add up. Jasper Gwyn had done her portrait at least a year before that. How can someone copy a book that hasn’t yet been published?

  She turned again toward her neighbor, but it was evident that he couldn’t be of much help.

  Maybe Jasper Gwyn had read it before it was published, she thought. It was a reasonable hypothesis. She vaguely recalled that the situation with Klarisa Rode’s manuscripts was intricate. Nothing more likely than that Jasper Gwyn had managed, in some way, to see them before they ended up at the publisher. It made sense. But just then, from a distance, there came back to her something that Tom had said to her, a long time before. It was the day when he was explaining to her what sort of person Jasper Gwyn was. He had told her that story of the son he hadn’t acknowledged. But he had also told her something else: that there were books, at least two, written by Jasper Gwyn, that were circulating in the world, but not under his name.

  Shit, she thought.

  That’s why unpublished works by that woman don’t stop coming out. He writes them.

  It was madness, but it might also be the truth.

  It would change quite a few things, she said to herself. Instinctively she thought back to that day when everything ended, and saw herself throwing that stupid book against the wall. Was it possible that it wasn’t a stupid book but a precious gift? She had trouble putting the pieces together. For a moment the idea crossed her mind that something important had been restored to her, something that she had been owed for a long time. She was trying to understand what, exactly, when she realized that the train was at the station where she was supposed to get out.

  “Shit!”

  She got up and hurried out.

  It took a moment to realize that she had forgotten something.

  “Emma!”

  She turned while the doors were closing. She began to beat the palms of her hands against the glass and yell something, but the train was slowly pulling away.

  Some people had stopped and were looking at her.

  “My daughter!” cried Rebecca. “My daughter’s on the train!”

  It was not so simple, then, to get her back.

  59

  She didn’t find it necessary, later, to tell the whole story to Robert, but when it was time to go to bed Rebecca said that she absolutely had to finish reading something for work and asked him to go to sleep, she would stay out there—she wouldn’t be long.

  “If Emma wakes up?” he asked.

  “As usual. Suffocate her with a pillow.”

  “Okay.”

  He was a sweet-natured man.

  Lying on the sofa, Rebecca picked up the book by Klarisa Rode, began again from the beginning, and read it to the end. It was two in the morning when she got to the last page. The story was set in a Danish town in the eighteenth century, and was about a father and his five children. She found it beautiful. Near the beginning there was, in fact, as if inlaid, the portrait that Jasper Gwyn had made of her, but Rebecca looked in vain, in the rest of the book, for something that bore significant traces of it. Nor could she find a single page that might have been written deliberately for her. Only that kind of painting, standing in a corner, with indisputable mastery.

  Things had ended so long ago with Jasper Gwyn that to try to understand, now, what that whole business meant seemed for a moment an effort that she had no desire to make. It was late, the next day she had to take Emma to her mother-in-law and then rush off to work. She thought it was better to forget about it and go to bed. But as she was turning out the lights and putting some other thing in its place, she had the strange sensation of not being there, and of refining the details of someone else’s life. With a prick of dismay she realized that, in a single day, a certain distance that she had worked at for years had elegantly shifted—a curtain in a gust of wind. And from far away came a nostalgia that she thought she had defeated.

  So, instead of going to bed, she did something she would never have imagined doing. She opened a closet and took out from under a pile of winter blankets the folders with the portraits. She made some coffee, sat down at the table, and began to open the folders, randomly. She began to read here and there, in no order, as she might have walked through a gallery of paintings. She didn’t do it to try to understand, or to find answers. Only she enjoyed the colors, that particular light, the sure step, the traces of a certain imagination. She did it because all that was a place, and in no other place would she have wanted to be that night.

  She stopped when the first light of dawn was filtering in. Her eyes were burning. She felt a sudden, heavy weariness, unavoidable. She got in bed, and Robert woke just enough to ask her, without really being aware of it, if everything was all right.

  “Yes, go to sleep.”

  She pressed against him lightly, turning onto her side, and fell asleep.

  60

  The next day when she awoke she didn’t understand anything. She telephoned her office to say she had an emergency and couldn’t come to work. Then she brought Emma to her mother-in-law’s; she was a likable woman fatter than Rebecca who couldn’t stop being grateful to her for having gotten her son out of the clutches of a woman who ate only vegetarian. Rebecca said she would be back in the aftern
oon and added that if she happened to be late she would let her know. She kissed Emma and went home.

  In the silence of the empty rooms she picked up Rode’s book again. And she forced herself to think. She hated puzzles and was aware that she didn’t have the right intelligence to enjoy solving them. She wasn’t even so sure she wanted to reopen a story she had thought was dead and buried. But certainly she would have liked to be sure that that book had truly been a gift for her—the loving touch she had missed in that farewell of so many years ago. Just as, undeniably, she was attracted by the possibility of uncovering, on her own, as far as she could, the infinite strangeness of Jasper Gwyn.

  She sat thinking for a long time.

  Then she got up, took the folders with the portraits, removed from the pile the one with her portrait, and put all the others in a large purse. She dressed and called a taxi. She was driven to the neighborhood of the British Museum, because she had decided that if there was anyone in the world who could help her, it was Doc Mallory.

  61

  She had met Mallory in Tom’s office. He was one of the many unlikely characters who worked there, although the word work didn’t exactly give the idea. He was around fifty, and had a real name, but everyone called him Doc. Tom had had him around for years, and considered him absolutely indispensable. Mallory, in fact, was the man who had read everything. He had a formidable memory and seemed to have spent a couple of lifetimes looking at books and cataloguing them in his remarkable mental index. When you needed something, you went to him. Normally you found him at his desk, reading. He always wore a jacket and tie, because, he maintained, books deserve respect, all of them, even the terrible ones. You went to him to find out the exact spelling of a Russian name or to get an idea of Japanese literature in the twenties. Things like that. To see him at work was a privilege. Once one of Tom’s writers had run into an accusation of plagiarism; it seemed that he had copied a scene of a brawl from an American crime novel of the fifties. Tom had torn the incriminating pages out of the book and brought them to Mallory.