Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  “See if you can recall thirty books that have a scene of this type,” he said.

  A couple of hours later Mallory had appeared with a detailed list of scuffles and brawls that all seemed written by the same hand.

  “Incredible!” Tom had said.

  “My duty,” Mallory had answered, and returned to his desk, to read a biography of Magellan.

  When Tom died, he had opened, with his savings, a small bookshop near the British Museum, where he had only books that he liked. Rebecca went there from time to time, more than anything for the pleasure of saying hello and talking. But that day was different, she had something very precise to ask. When she entered the shop, even before greeting him, she turned around the sign on the door that said YES, WE ARE OPEN! On the other side it said I WILL NOT RETURN SOON.

  “You intend to stay for a while, it seems to me,” said Mallory from behind the counter.

  “You can bet on it,” said Rebecca.

  62

  She placed the bag on the floor and gave him a hug. Not that she exactly loved him, but something like that. He always had the same smell, of dust and anise candies.

  “You don’t look like someone who’s come to buy a book, Rebecca.”

  “No. I came to make this day unforgettable for you.”

  “Aha.”

  “Doc, do you remember Jasper Gwyn?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  And he started off on his complete bibliography.

  “Forget that, it’s something else I wanted to ask you. You remember that business of the portraits?”

  Mallory began to laugh. “And who doesn’t—at Tom’s no one talked about anything else.”

  “Did you ever know anything about it?”

  “You were the one who knew everything.”

  “Yes, but did you know anything?”

  “Very little. People said that he was crazy, with that idea. But there was also a rumor that he had reached the point of selling the portraits for a hundred thousand pounds each.”

  “If only,” said Rebecca.

  “You see that you’re the one who knows the story?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know everything. I’m missing a piece and only you can help me.”

  “Me?”

  Rebecca leaned over, took the folders out of the purse, and placed them on the counter.

  Doc Mallory had been working on some bills when she entered, so he was in shirtsleeves. He turned around, went and got his jacket, put it on, and came back to the counter.

  “These are them?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “May I?”

  He turned the folders so that they faced him, and confined himself to delicately placing his hands on them, palms open.

  “Tom would have given an arm to be able to read them,” he said, with a trace of sadness.

  “And you?”

  Mallory looked up at her. “You know, to read them would be a privilege for me.”

  “Then do it, Doc, I need you to do it.”

  Mallory was silent for a moment. His eyes were shining.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I need to know if he copied them.”

  “Copied?”

  “If they were taken from other books, I don’t know, something of the sort.”

  “Come now, it wouldn’t make sense.”

  “A lot of things don’t make sense when you’re talking about Jasper Gwyn.”

  Mallory smiled. He knew it was true.

  “Have you read them?”

  “More or less.”

  “And have you got an idea?”

  “No. But I haven’t read all the books in the world.”

  Mallory burst out laughing.

  “Mind you, I haven’t read them all. Often I skim them,” he said. Then he brought the folders a little closer.

  “I think you’re crazy.”

  “Let’s take away the doubt. Read them.”

  He hesitated still a moment.

  “It would be an enormous pleasure.”

  “Then read them.”

  “All right, I’ll read them.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand, read them now, then forget them immediately and if you so much as mention it to anyone I’ll come here personally and rip out your balls.”

  Mallory looked at her. Rebecca smiled.

  “I was joking.”

  “Ah.”

  “But not really.”

  Then she took off her raincoat, looked for a chair where she could sit down, and said to Mallory that he could take all the time he needed, they had the whole day.

  “Don’t you have something for me to read, so I don’t get bored?” she asked.

  Mallory made a vague gesture toward his shelves, without even looking up from the folders, which were still closed.

  “Figure it out yourself, I have work to do,” he said.

  63

  Two hours later Mallory closed the last folder and was still for a moment. Rebecca looked up from her book as if to say something. But Mallory waved at her, to stop her. He wanted to think a little more, or he needed time to return from some very distant place.

  Finally he asked Rebecca what the clients had thought of the portraits. Just out of curiosity.

  “They were always very satisfied,” Rebecca answered. “They recognized themselves. It was something they didn’t expect, a kind of magic.”

  Mallory nodded.

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  Then he asked another question.

  “You know which is the one of Tom?”

  There were no names on the portraits, they could have been portraits of anyone.

  “I’m not sure, but I think I recognized him.”

  They looked at each other.

  “The one where there are only children?” ventured Mallory.

  Rebecca nodded.

  “I would have bet on it,” Mallory said, laughing.

  “It’s really Tom, no?”

  “Spitting image.”

  Rebecca smiled at him. It was incredible how that man had understood everything practically without asking a single question. Maybe reading thousands of books isn’t so useless, she thought. Then she remembered that she was there to find out something very particular.

  “And the business of the copying, what do you say, Doc?”

  She said it as if it were not, after all, a very important detail.

  Mallory hesitated a moment. He made some vague gestures and gained time by taking out a large handkerchief and noisily blowing his nose. While he refolded it and put it in his pocket he said that he had already read one of those portraits. He took out one folder from the others and put it on the table. He opened it. He re-read some lines.

  “Yes, this comes directly from another book,” he said reluctantly.

  Rebecca felt a sharp stab of pain somewhere and couldn’t hide a grimace.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Everything was becoming damnably more complicated.

  “Do you remember what book it is?” she asked.

  “Yes, it’s titled Three Times at Dawn. A beautiful book, short. I remember the first part as very similar to this portrait, maybe not literally the same, I think it’s longer. But some sentences I could swear are identical. And the scene is the same, the two in a hotel, there’s no doubt.”

  Rebecca ran a hand through her hair. Fuck, she thought. She took the open folder, turned it, glanced at the beginning of the portrait. One of the finest. Damn.

  “Do you have that book?” she asked.

  “No, I had it but it disappeared immediately. A small publisher brought it out, in very few copies—it was a kind of oddity.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Well, it was found among the papers of an old music teacher, an Indian who had died some years earlier. No one supposed that he had ever written anything, but that story turned up. They thought it was good and they published it—maybe a couple of years ago. B
ut a thousand copies, even less. A trifle.”

  Rebecca looked up at him.

  “What did you say?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Repeat what you said.”

  “Nothing… That an Indian man, now dead, wrote it some years ago, someone who did something else, who in his life had never published anything. You know, a kind of tidbit, no? But very beautiful, I have to say. The typical thing that someone like Jasper Gwyn could have read.”

  The typical thing that someone like Jasper Gwyn could have written, thought Rebecca. And Doc Mallory couldn’t understand why she suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter, and was embracing him. Nor did he understand well those red eyes.

  “Doc, I love you.”

  “You should have told me years ago, baby.”

  “He didn’t copy them, Doc, he certainly didn’t copy them.”

  “Really, I just demonstrated the opposite.”

  “Someday I’ll explain, but you have to believe me, he didn’t copy them.”

  “And how do you explain Three Times at Dawn?”

  “Forget it, you can’t understand, just tell me if you have it.”

  “I told you. No.”

  “You never have anything.”

  “Hey, Missy!”

  “I’m joking, come on, write down the author and title.”

  Mallory did it. Rebecca glanced at it.

  “Akash Narayan, Three Times at Dawn, okay.”

  “The publisher had one of those ridiculous names like Wheat and Corn. That type.”

  “I’ll sort it out. Now I have to go and find it.”

  She picked up the folders, put them in her purse. While she put on her raincoat she reminded Mallory of what would happen if he merely dared to mention to someone what he had read that day.

  “All right, all right.”

  “I’ll be back soon and tell you everything. You’re great, Doc.”

  She hurried off as if she were years late. In a certain sense she was.

  Before closing that evening, Doc Mallory went to the shelf where he had two of the three novels by Jasper Gwyn (the first he had never liked). He took them down, and for a while turned them over in his hands. He said something in an undertone, inclining his head slightly, maybe in a bow.

  64

  Rebecca found Three Times at Dawn in an enormous bookstore at Charing Cross, and for the first time thought that those odious supermarkets of books made sense. She couldn’t resist the temptation, and began to leaf through it there, sitting on the floor, in a tranquil corner that displayed child-care books.

  The publisher in fact had a name like that. Vine and Plow. Horrible, she thought. On the jacket flap there was a biographical note about Akash Narayan. It said he was born in Birmingham and had died there at ninety-two, having spent his life teaching music. It didn’t specify what type. Then it said that Three Times at Dawn was his only book, and that it had been published posthumously. Nothing else. Not even a hint of a photograph.

  Nor did the back cover say much. It revealed that the story took place in an unspecified English city, and that it all unfolded in a couple of hours. But a very paradoxical couple of hours, it added, in a deliberately enigmatic tone.

  Glancing at the frontispiece she discovered that the book had been written in Hindi, and only afterward translated into English. The name of the translator said nothing to her. But it was, instead, with great satisfaction that she read the curious dedication that appeared at the head of the first chapter.

  For Catherine de Médicis and the master of Camden Town.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Gwyn,” she said in a low voice.

  Then she hurried home, because she had a book to read.

  65

  She left Emma to sleep at her grandmother’s, and asked Robert if he would go out to the movies with some friends because she absolutely had to stay home alone that night. She had a really difficult job to do and she would like to do it with no one wandering around the house. She said it in a nice way, and he, as noted, had a sweet nature. He asked only what time he could come back.

  “Not before one?” Rebecca tried.

  “Let’s see,” he said. He had had in mind an evening with half an hour of television and early to bed.

  Then, before going out, he kissed her and asked only: “I shouldn’t worry, right?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Rebecca, although she wasn’t entirely sure.

  Alone, she sat at the table and began to read.

  Predictably, Doc wasn’t wrong. Three Times at Dawn was in three parts, and the first was very similar to one of Jasper Gwyn’s portraits. It even turned out to be true that it was a little longer, but, when she began to check, Rebecca determined that all the important things were there. Without any doubt the two texts were close relatives.

  Nor was Doc wrong in saying that the book was a beautiful book. The other two parts flowed so smoothly that Rebecca ended up reading them, forgetting for long stretches the real reason that she was doing it. The book consisted mainly of dialogues, and there were two principal characters, the same ones in each part, but there was something paradoxical and surprising about it. At the end she regretted that Akash Narayan had wasted all that time as a music teacher, when he could write like this. Provided she believed that he truly existed, obviously.

  Rebecca got up to make coffee. She looked at the time, and saw that she still had a good bit of the evening. She got out Jasper Gwyn’s portraits and put them on the table.

  All right, she said to herself. To summarize: Rode doesn’t exist, it’s Jasper Gwyn who writes her books. Same goes for Akash Narayan. And so far we’ve got it, she thought. Why he put my portrait in Klarisa Rode’s book I can imagine: because he loved me (she smiled at this thought). Now let’s see if we can discover why the hell he put the other portrait in Three Times at Dawn. And that portrait in particular. Who is this shit who deserved a gift as nice as mine? she wondered. She was beginning to enjoy herself.

  The problem was that there was nothing in the portraits entrusted to her by Jasper Gwyn that could be traced back with certainty to one of the clients who had paid to have them done. Not a name, not a date, nothing. Besides, the simple but singular technique with which they had been executed made it difficult to recognize the person who had inspired them, unless you had a profound familiarity with him. In other words, it looked like an impossible job.

  Rebecca began to proceed by elimination. She had read a page of the portrait of the girl, and she was gratified to be able to say that the one in Three Times at Dawn wasn’t hers. The portrait of Tom she thought she had recognized, and if she had doubts Mallory had removed them: so that, too, could be eliminated (a pity, she thought, it was the only case that would not trouble her). So nine remained.

  She took a piece of paper and listed them in a column.

  Mr. Trawley

  The forty-year-old with the mania about India (Aha, she thought.)

  The former hostess

  The boy who painted

  The actor

  The two who had just gotten married

  The doctor

  The woman with her four Verlaine poems

  The queen’s tailor

  End

  She set aside the folders with her portrait, Tom’s, and the girl’s. Then she opened the others and arranged them on the table.

  And now let’s see if I can get somewhere.

  She tried to come up with hypotheses, and several times she moved the open folders on the table, trying to match them with the people on the list. It was head-splitting, and for that reason it was some time before Rebecca noticed a detail that she should have noticed long ago, and which left her bewildered. The characters were nine but the portraits ten.

  She checked three times, but there was no doubt.

  Jasper Gwyn had sent her one extra portrait.

  Impossible, she thought. She had made the arrangements, one by one, for those portraits, she had followed them from the beginning
to the end, and it was unthinkable that for all the time they had worked together Jasper Gwyn had managed to make one that she knew nothing about.

  That portrait shouldn’t have existed.

  She counted again.

  No, there really were ten.

  Where did this tenth come from? And who the hell was it?

  She understood suddenly, with the blazing speed with which we understand, long afterward, things that have been in front of us forever, had we only known how to look.

  She picked up the portrait that was in Three Times at Dawn and began to re-read it.

  How could I not have thought of this before?, she asked herself.

  The hotel lobby, shit.

  She continued to read, avidly, as if swallowed by the words.

  Hell, it’s him, exactly, she thought.

  Then she looked up and realized that all the portraits made by Jasper Gwyn would remain hidden, as he had wished, but that two would be hidden in a singular fashion, wandering through the world sewn secretly into the pages of two books. One she knew well, and it was hers. The other she had just recognized, and it was the portrait that any painter sooner or later attempts—a self-portrait. From a distance, it seemed to her, they looked at each other, a handbreadth above the others. Now yes, she thought—now it’s the way I never stopped imagining it.

  She got up and looked for something to do. Something simple. She began to straighten up the books that were lying around, all over the house. She merely placed them on top of one another, but in small piles, from the biggest to the smallest. Meanwhile she thought of the delayed sweetness of Jasper Gwyn, turning it over in her mind, in the pleasure of observing it from every side. She did it in the light of a strange happiness that she had never felt before, yet which she seemed to have carried with her for years, waiting. It seemed impossible that, in all that time, she could have done anything except guard it and hide it. What we are capable of, she thought. Growing up, loving, having children, growing old—and all this while we are elsewhere, in the long time of an answer that doesn’t arrive, or of a gesture that doesn’t end. How many paths, and at what a different pace we retrace them, in what seems a single journey.