2008 - The Book of Murder

by Guillermo Martinez

  “In collaboration? With whom?”

  Kloster looked at me warily, as if he might have gone too far and was suddenly unsure whether he should go on. Perhaps it was the first time he’d told anyone.

  “I hinted at it, the first time we spoke, when I admitted that I didn’t believe the deaths were occurring entirely by chance. But at the time I couldn’t put it into words. It was the only possible explanation but also the one nobody would believe. Not even I fully believed it, until now. Perhaps you still won’t. You may remember, I mentioned the preface to Henry James’s Notebooks.”

  “Yes, I remember it perfectly: you said that’s where you got the idea of dictating your novels.”

  “There’s something else in the book. Something he reveals in some of the more personal notes, which I never would have suspected of the ironic and cosmopolitan Henry James. He had, or believed he had, a guiding spirit, or ‘guardian angel’. Sometimes he calls him his ‘demon of patience’, at others his ‘daimon’, or the ‘blessed Genius’, or ‘mon bon’. He invokes him, waits for him, sometimes senses him sitting near. He says he can even feel his breath on his cheek. He entrusts himself to this spirit, appeals to him when inspiration fails, waits for him whenever he moves into a new study to write. A guiding spirit that was with him all his life, until he started dictating. This may be what most struck me in the Notebooks: all references to his angel ceased at the moment when another person entered his workroom, when spoken words replaced silent pleas. As if the secret collaboration had been ended for ever. I remember that when I read the invocations of the guardian angel I couldn’t help smiling: I had trouble picturing venerable, distinguished Henry James pleading like a child to an invisible friend. It seemed puerile, if touching, and made me feel as if I’d been snooping and had seen something I shouldn’t have. Yes, I found it laughable and I forgot about it almost immediately. Until I started dictating myself. But unlike James, it was through dictation that I had a visitation of my own. Only it wasn’t a guardian angel.”

  He took another sip from his glass and stared into the distance for a moment, before placing the glass back on the edge of the table and looking at me again with the same open expression.

  “I think I’ve already told you about that morning: after days of silence, paralysis, I started dictating to Luciana again in a sudden rush, as if transported. As I was dictating to her, someone else was dictating to me in an imperious, brutal whisper that cut through all scruples, all doubts. I wanted the scene ahead of me, the scene at which I’d stopped, to be especially horrific. The bloody but methodical revenge carried out by the Cainites. I’d never written anything like it before; I’d always preferred more civilised, more discreet murders. I thought it wasn’t in my nature, that I’d never be able to do it. But suddenly, all I had to do was listen. Listen to the dark, ferocious whisper that conjured up the knife and the throat with perfect realism. Follow the miraculous connection, the voice that wouldn’t back down before anything, that killed and killed again. Thomas Mann said that, while writing Death in Venice, he had the sensation of moving forward unhindered, the impression, for the first time in his life, of being ‘carried in the air’. I too felt it for the first time. But I can’t say that the voice carrying me was benevolent. Instead it seemed to be dragging me, controlling me, a primitive, superior evil that I had to obey. A voice that I could only just follow, that had taken over everything, that seemed to wield the knife with savage joy, as if saying: “It’s easy, it’s simple, you do this and this and this.” By the time I had finished dictating the scene I was surprised to find that I didn’t have bloody hands. But something of the almost sexual euphoria, of the fit of inspiration, persisted. A remnant of that all-powerful urge. I think it was this terrible combination that made me try to kiss Luciana. I only returned to reality when I realised she was resisting.”

  He raised his head slightly and shook it almost imperceptibly, as if he were reproving himself and trying to shake off the memory.

  “Later, that night, I reread the pages I had dictated to her. There was no doubt: they were someone else’s. I could never have written anything like them, without error or hesitation. The language was primordial, with a terrible, primitive force that seemed to touch deep evil. I was terrified seeing the words there, fixed on paper, incontrovertible proof that it had been real. I couldn’t work on the novel again; I felt it was fatally contaminated by that other writing. I stopped at the last sentence I had dictated to Luciana before she got up to make coffee. I put it away in a drawer and tried to forget about it, to deny what had happened with rational arguments. Then the series of tragedies: I lost my daughter, I lost my life. I was disconnected from the world, devoid of thought. All I could do was watch the film of Pauli, over and over. I thought I’d never write again. Until, that summer, I went to the beach at Villa Gesell, and saw that body disappear out to sea. It was like a sign written in the water. Anyone would say it was an accident, and that’s what I thought at the time. But I understood what the sign was telling me. I knew the story I had to write. I didn’t know, I never could have imagined, that it was his novel—the beginning of his novel. I returned to Buenos Aires the next day: I just wanted to get started. Suddenly everything seemed clear. I could see the tiny but unmistakable light at the end of the tunnel—the subject of the novel. After all, it wasn’t so different from the story about the Cainites that I’d set aside. Only this one would take place in the present day. There’d be a girl, rather like Luciana. And someone who’d lost a daughter, like me. The girl would have a family just like Luciana’s. For once in a novel I wanted to keep some resemblance to real life, because I felt that the secret source, the wound I needed to prod, was my own. I didn’t want to forget myself, to let myself be swept along, as in my other books, by the flow of my imagination. The subject, of course, was punishment—what constitutes proportionate punishment. An eye for an eye, states the lex talionis. But what if one eye is smaller than the other? I had lost a daughter, but Luciana didn’t have any children. Yet my grief cried out that a daughter wasn’t equivalent to a short-term boyfriend with whom Luciana didn’t even seem to get on. I began writing with rigorous determination, but something seemed to have dried up, died inside me, as if my daughter’s death meant I was banished not only from the human race, but from my own writing. The few lines I managed to scribble each day were unrecognisable. Nothing was right. So, in my own way, I invoked him. I appealed to him night after night, until suddenly I realised I was no longer alone. He had returned. I could feel him once again at my shoulder. And I let him do as he pleased—I let him dictate to me again. He provided the momentum, gave the command, made the tuning fork hum. It was like a gradual thaw, as if the stone I had become had started to ooze. But I was writing again, and I knew exactly to whom I owed it. Inwardly I referred to him as my ‘Sredni Vashtar’. He was invisible, but his monstrous voice was as familiar as the sound of a loved one’s breathing. He was not only real but almost palpable, and I was sure anyone would know which sentences on the page were his. At first, it was almost all of them. But the physical act of writing, like a magical exercise of the muscles, gradually brought back my old skill, some of my old self. He’d made the electricity flow, made the dead man live again. I came back to life. I recovered my old pride, the only one I have, and no longer wanted his company. I went back to my long vigils, to my usual wavering and meandering, to my own imagination. But it wasn’t easy to get rid of him. I could feel him riding on my shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea. And of course his sentences were always better than mine—primordial, savage, direct. But I managed to reject them one by one, despite the temptation. Eventually I felt I was alone again. And I thought I was free of him at last.”

  “When was this?”

  “Almost a year later, just before writing the scene with the parents’ death. I pictured them dying at their house by the beach, during their winter holiday, from a carbon monoxide leak from the boiler. That kind of accident happens every year. I
didn’t consider any other possibility. When I went back to writing on my own, I realised that some of my bitterness had gone, life had resumed, and I was starting to forget Luciana. The novel was no longer a voodoo doll. My writing had drifted in another direction. The parents in the novel were no longer Luciana’s parents. I could view them artistically and devise the kind of death that best suited them, just like characters in any of my novels. After all, I’d spent a lifetime thinking up murders. So perhaps because I no longer had the same desire for revenge, I imagined a painless end for them, in their sleep, together in the marital bed. I wrote the scene with absolute calmness of spirit. Then, a couple of weeks later, I received Luciana’s letter: her parents really had died. The letter was muddled—really she was begging me to forgive her for suing me, which was what had started it all, but she mentioned her parents’ death as if it were something I would know. And she told me the date of their death: it was the day after I had written the scene. Of course, I was stunned. I looked for news of the case in the papers. All the details were there. The circumstances were slightly different, but it seemed only to be a difference of style: a much more horrible death but, in its way, natural.”

  “When you say natural,” I broke in, suddenly remembering what I had thought, what I’d felt I’d glimpsed, in the basement of the newspaper offices, “do you mean…”

  “In the most literal sense. There were no boilers or ovens involved, nothing that had anything to do with civilisation. Poison from a plant—a simple, primitive death. I realised immediately that he had devised it. And as you’ll understand, I was shocked. It was one thing sensing his presence in the whispering, in the strange communion of that private dictation or in the blameless lines of a text, but quite another admitting that he existed outside me and could kill in the real world. I didn’t take that step. Though the evidence was there before my eyes, I couldn’t believe that there was a causal connection, that reality had responded to my text. Those past few months, as I said, I had come to feel like myself again. The few lines I managed to set down laboriously every day had gradually restored me to my former self. And my former self had always been sceptical, even contemptuous, of the irrational. I had, after all, studied science at university, and had written entire passages mocking the very idea of religion. I decided to consider the dictation episode as a passing fit, a period of mental disturbance brought on by the loss of my daughter. This was something I could admit: grief had made me temporarily lose my mind. Even so, even though I refused to believe, I was a little shaken, so I left the novel at that point. It remained in a drawer for years. It wasn’t exactly a superstitious fear that I felt, but something more personal: the secret motor, my desire for revenge, had subsided. With the death of Luciana’s parents I had, at last, however monstrous this may sound, achieved reparation. My wound had healed, my flame had died down and, after the first moment of astonishment at the coincidence, I was at peace, if a little guilty, because I couldn’t help feeling that in anticipating and preparing those deaths in my imagination I had, in a mysterious, indirect way, prompted them. In any case, the ratio now seemed right and I almost wrote back to Luciana. Truly I no longer bore her any ill will.”

  “But at some point you reopened that drawer.”

  Kloster nodded slowly. “Years passed—three, four, I forget how many. I didn’t think about any of it again, and in the meantime wrote other books. Until one day I read a short article in the paper about premonitions in dreams. You know what I mean: one night someone dreams about the death of a loved one and the next day it comes true, as if the dream were really a prediction, an arrow shot at the target. The article was written by a professor of statistics, and the tone was rather mocking. He did a simple sum calculating the probabilities and showed that the likelihood of a premonition in a dream coming true was very low, but not so low that, in a big city like Tokyo or Buenos Aires, the coincidence between two events—person X having the dream and their loved one Y dying—didn’t routinely occur. Of course to the person who has the dream the coincidence is astonishing and they see it as a psychic phenomenon, the manifestation of a supernatural power; but for someone who could look down on an entire city at night and keep count of everyone’s dreams, it would be no more surprising than a bingo-caller hearing someone shout out ‘Bingo’. The article was very persuasive and made me think differently about the scene I’d written and the death of Luciana’s parents. I was rather ashamed of having given in to the fundamentally arrogant and superstitious belief that my writing could have had such an effect on reality. With hindsight, it seemed obvious that it had simply been a coincidence between two unrelated events. That night there must have been an army of writers imagining, as I was, some death or other. It just happened that what I’d imagined subsequently took place. A lottery number in a sea of statistics, assigned to me by chance. I opened the drawer again and reread the novel to where I’d left it. But now I was surprised by something else: it was the best thing I’d ever written. And, stranger still, I couldn’t distinguish between his writing and mine. I could no longer point out which sentences had been dictated to me. The whole text seemed to be both familiar and written by someone else. This had happened before when I’d gone back to some of my books and found passages I didn’t recognise, but what I’m trying to say is that I decided to believe—wanted to believe—that it was me who had written every one of those pages. That all the ideas were mine alone. I wanted to take possession of the book. But really I should say that it took possession of me once again. I couldn’t resist continuing. I realised that there was no doubt it would be my masterpiece, perhaps my only great novel. So you see, I gave in to that other arrogant superstition: wanting to create something ‘great’. Anyway, I returned to it, night after night. Until the time came to imagine the brother’s death.”

  “Even when you knew what might happen?”

  “In the novel, the process of revenge had to continue,” said Kloster, as if it were too late for regrets. “But I did waver. I had months of doubts, of scruples. As in De Quincey’s tale, I felt the thin line, on the edge of the abyss, between dabbling in murder and becoming a fully fledged murderer. Then I thought I’d found a solution. But I was wrong. I thought if I simply devised a highly improbable death, a set of extreme coincidences, it wouldn’t be replicated in real life. Luciana had once mentioned that while he was at medical school her brother had been on a work placement in the prison service. It was the only thing I knew about him. In addition, I had, as you know, corresponded with a number of prisoners in different jails. I linked the two and imagined a convict in a high security prison pretending to have a seizure so as to be taken to the infirmary. Luciana’s brother, now a junior doctor, would be on duty that night and the convict would stab and kill him while trying to escape. As I wrote the scene, I added a few details, from the little I knew about the inside of prisons, that would make the chain of events seem more believable, yet, subtly, more unlikely. But it happened again. Once again, in a slightly different way; once again, as if it were a version revised by someone bolder, crueller. And, as if it were part of the joke, in an even more bizarre sequence of events. The convict hadn’t tried to escape: his own jailers had opened the door so he could leave to burgle people’s houses. Luciana’s brother no longer worked at the prison but during his time at the infirmary he’d met, of all the wives of all the prisoners, the wife of the most vicious. I first found out about it, as you did, as everybody did, in the papers. That morning I read, and reread in disbelief, the name of Luciana’s brother. Same age, same profession, and from the photo I could see they looked very alike. Yes, it had happened again.”

  “And once again there was something savage, primitive, about it,” I said, at last seeing the connection I’d missed. “The man killed him with his bare hands, without using his gun.”

  “Exactly. It bore his stamp, I could tell immediately. I was beginning to understand his methods, his preferences: the wild sea waves, the natural poison of fungi, the cruelty
of one man attacking another like a beast with claws and teeth, as at the dawn of time. A few days later that policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me and showed me the anonymous letters. They were uncouth but precise, and effective. I almost told him everything, as I’m telling you now. But he had his own theory. He spotted a book by Poe on my bookshelves and started talking about The Tell-Tale Heart, of the desire to confess that he’d seen again and again in murderers. I realised from the way he spoke about Luciana that he suspected her. He asked if I had any samples of her handwriting. I gave him the letter she had sent me a few years earlier, in which she asked for forgiveness. He read it carefully and while he was comparing the handwriting he confided that Luciana had spent time in hospital, with a syndrome known as ‘morbid guilt’. Sufferers secretly feel guilty about some harm they’ve done for which they haven’t been punished. Indirectly, and in different ways, they seek to punish themselves. Ramoneda said Luciana was obsessed with the thought that she’d had something to do with my daughter’s death. Hearing this, so many years later, caused me a sort of belated, bitter joy. I’d wanted her to have to think of Pauli every day of her life, and that wish had also been granted. Ramoneda said nothing more and I was sure that, whatever his suspicions, he’d keep them to himself and not do anything. After all, he had his culprit and pressure from the entire government to close the case and hush up the scandal over the convict’s escape.

  “Once he’d left, though, I found myself wondering whether this wasn’t another possible explanation. A rational explanation. I considered each death again in this new light. Luciana could have put some substance in her boyfriend’s coffee: she studied biology, she’d have known what to use that would go undetected in a postmortem and she was there with him every day. And the following year, Luciana could have planted poisonous fungi in the little wood, during the same kind of lightning visit to Villa Gesell that she accused me of. Wasn’t she the one who knew all there was to know about fungi? And finally, Luciana could have written the anonymous letters. She probably knew about her brother’s relationship with that woman. But I had to dismiss this possibility before it went very far: Luciana could never have achieved the insane synchronicity between the dates of the deaths and the progress of my novel.