3 Novellas: Home / Leaving for Jerusalem / The Nobel Prize

by Mois Benarroch

  And, take this book with you. It’s called the Tanakh, I can’t read it but someone in Jerusalem will.

  —Have we reached our city father?

  —No, but we can see the sea all day and all night.

  —And does the sea ever end?

  —It ends when we stop walking.

  —So why don’t we stop walking?

  —Because we have to reach the city. And the city has no sea.

  —Who told you to walk to the city?

  —It’s an ancient call, as old as the fist flight of the first fly.

  —And why should we follow it?

  —Because we are attracted by the beauty of the city.

  —But we have never seen it.

  —Yes, we have seen it, long before we were born, and the earth takes us there, wherever we go.

  —Will my son see the city?

  —You are the city, my son, you are the city.

  THE NOBEL PRIZE

  "Narrating, my father said, is like playing poker, the whole secret is to look like a liar when you are telling the truth."

  Ricardo Piglia

  1.

  At the time I wasn’t sure whether I was a writer or something that could not be defined. Obviously I was one; you are a writer once you have published 20 controversial books. People remember only the parts that bothered them and. I was more controversial than read. I never expected at the age of 50 that this would be my literary destiny, and I could not or did not know how to do anything else but write. For my endeavors I earned little money and, from sheer inertia, wrote one book after the other, like a machine. My books were often not published, or, worse, published by small presses with minimal runs and poor sales. I was like a typewriter, a machine that was not aware of what it was doing. I did not know where I was going, or what had led me there. In middle age, I was still waiting for something to happen.

  I socialized with very few people, hardly talked to the world; I could only talk to the page. Years before, I had been very social, but in those cold days of winter I did not want to talk to anyone.

  I was walking to the post office to see if a publishing contract or a book from a friend had arrived, when I met one of those writers nobody hears about, who you meet 20 years after you were first part of a clique. We greeted each other, He said he had followed my publications, read two of my books which he did not like very much, and that I was surely full of money from all the books as I they had been translated into many languages.

  Indeed I wish it was so. I hardly made enough money to buy bread. Sometimes it even costs me money. I would get invited to a big city to present a book and at the end of the day I would spend a fortune and sales would barely cover my expenses.

  He laughed out loud as if it was a joke coming from the mouth of the best comedian in New York, and I did not understand why. More and more often I made people laugh without intending to do so and at night it made me weep.

  He suddenly asked an unexpected question. He asked me if I remembered Jorge, the writer who was older than us and who was a part of our group. At first I thought: Jorge who?

  The one who was already bald, now we all are, but he was the first to be bald, and used to laugh at his baldness, whilst reminding us. :’that it was just a matter of time for all of us.

  "No idea."

  "The one who fell from a balcony in one of those parties in Pinto Street."

  Now I started to remember.

  "But are you sure his name was Jorge? Wasn’t it Pablo or Raul?"

  "He was the first of us to publish a novel."

  "That one."

  "And he was a doctor or something like that."

  "Maybe, I think a healer, some kind of natural medicine. Look, it turns out the guy is in a psychiatric hospital, completely mad, but the interesting thing is that each day he becomes a different person. Nobody knows what he has."

  "‘It’s called Dementia."

  "Yes, well. But the other day I met a literary critic who had been following him for years and he said he was a bit like Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, who in his last days believed he was Tarzan and spent his days calling Jane and shouting his famous scream. It turns out that Jorge becomes one of the characters in his books every day. That’s what the critic said. He also said that the psychiatrists do not understand his disorder."

  "And here I am living at the expense of my wife."

  "What?"

  The truth is I have no idea why I gave him that answer. Did I feel guilty about living on the expense of others? Or because I had thought several times that the goal of a writer is to become and live like characters in books. I dreamt of being a character that had no debts. A character’s life seemed simpler than a writer’s life. Maybe that’s why some people prefer to be slaves.

  "I see you in many anthologies ,lately, you are becoming a classic writer"…

  He stopped my thoughts.

  "‘You are well paid for it, Right?"

  The guy seemed obsessed with what I earned from my writing.

  "Yes, very much, five kilos of lentils per anthology."

  I laughed to myself, remembering that my friend Javier Perez once won a prize consisting of a few kilos of lentils. I love lentils and I thought it was a good prize, and tax free.

  "You say strange things," he laughed.

  I still couldn’t attach a name to the face in front of me. I had no idea how many or what books he had published. But it was clear he was one of the many Hispanic writers who came to our gatherings. Our group had lasted five and a half years with writers coming and going. We saw each other once a week at least and there were always outsiders and tourists who came once, or twice. The core of the group included a dozen writers, some left and others came, some went to other countries and did not return. This one was almost certainly not part of that core, but was on the periphery of it, although as it was nearly 30 years since all this happened and I could not be sure.

  "How is your writing going?"

  I said no books are written out of intuition. It proved to be accurate.

  "I will publish my first novel this year, with a very good publisher, I am not one of those writers who publish a book every year, or, God forbid, two or three a year, no, I am not a paper wholesaler. I work, pure and simple, on a single book every 30 years."

  He was trying to offend me, of course. When you publish a book, and a second one, you become public enemy of all those who can never finish a seven page short story. In the past I sent them to hell, but this writer, still unnamed, had a face. This one was funny.

  "Congratulations, congratulations, I am so happy; I knew one day you’d get there. One could see the talent behind your shyness."

  "Thank you, thank you, although I have not signed the contract, not yet, I want a bigger advance, I worked hard on this book and I think they should pay."

  This one’s really great. A first book and not only does he get an advance, he wants more. I, with all my public reputation, sometimes publish with no advance, if the publisher is not a major one. But this guy, he really knows how to take things. The only thing he needs is to live three hundred years and he can take us all. Or it might be that he is just looking for excuses not to publish.

  "Sure, sure, you’re right, do not give up, ask for what you deserve, and more, of course, that’s what I always say."

  "Well, you already make good money. You cannot complain."

  "Money yes, I can pay for my toothpaste, and I’m not complaining, it’s good for the gums, it is a Hindu toothpaste, you know, it is called Vicco, it’s Ayurvedic. Have you heard of it?"

  Now he looked puzzled. He checked his watch, and said:

  "You with your Vicco and us here with our Colgate. You should not complain, should not complain ... Well, I have to go, look, if you want to go see him, he is in the Jordan Psychiatric Hospital. He will not recognize you as he doesn’t recognize anyone, but maybe it can help."

  "Yes, I know where it is, it’s not far from my house."

  T
he writer that had never finished his book ran away and took the bus that had just stopped.

  As in many of these meetings I could not convince myself that they were real. I was not sure whether I had imagined them, or even written them, at least in my mind, or they really happened. I felt Schizophrenic. I felt like I was in a movie, where the main character finds himself in a mental institution and he is slowly receiving an explanation that everything that he beliefs to be real is the fruit of his imagination. But then are not all writers crazy? Don’t they invent their own lives every day? Aren’t they imagining it every minute?

  The thing that seemed more unreal was the feeling that the writer had left twice. Though I saw him go in the middle of the conversation, after I saw him leaving I could still see ourselves still talking. Those kind of awkward memories made me think it was all unreal. Perhaps the reason was that I smoked cigars and they made me feel dreamy.

  I kept it clearly in my mind that the writer was in the Jordan, an institute that I sometimes see when I walk home. It looks like a Roman fort and not an institute, or a hospital. The facade is concave and makes some sort of a half of an egg that creates a round courtyard, and the entrance is in the middle of the courtyard. I could go right away instead of going to the market to drink coffee. But I did not. No hurry. I thought I’d better reconsider it and try to make some sense of it all. This time it could really be a mirage.

  I was not always in this state. Each month there were bills to remind me that reality actually exists. Always more than we could afford. .And there was the back pain, toothache, pains in my ankles, knees, head and big toes; as if the members of the body took turns to remind me they existed. They prevented me from becoming a literary, character; all made of ink and without a body—.prevented me from flying. But in those days the economic situation was good, we had sold our house, and we bought a cheaper and bigger one, and on top of it we had a basement where I could work when the weather was not too hot or too cold, we paid the mortgage and debts, which were not many. I was out of work, which meant that publishers did not hire me for translation jobs, or that they wanted to pay me so little that it was better to be a guardian. I had won a prize two years ago and since that day the publishing houses considered me a rich man who had no need of publishing or translating in order to be able to eat. Everybody knows that artists eat little or nothing, or live inside their books and do not need anything, nor have any expenses.

  The encounter left me somewhat disturbed and instead of following my way to the market I turned around and went back home. I loved the new house, it had much more space than the old house where I had been living for 22 years, and I would turn around and return to my new home that gave me peace of mind. It was the opposite of what I had left; it was in a noisy and polluted street. I had left that flat often in order to escape. Now I could find air at home, especially if my children and my wife were busy with their chores and it was all mine.

  2.

  At home I waited for my wife to come back from work. I asked her if she remembered a bald writer who once jumped off the first floor, because of a lover.

  "Another writer? It would be better if you looked for work."

  "I am working, I’m writing a novel, the thing is I don’t have is money."

  "Then look for money."

  "That’s another matter; I don’t know how to get money."

  "Then learn."

  "Well, all right. But don’t you remember a bald writer in the Mareos group, one who was older than us?"

  "I kind of remember something; I think he had published a book before any of the rest of you did. And he was not much older than you."

  "I don’t think so. What book?"

  "A book of poems that won a prize."

  "I don’t remember such a thing."

  3.

  The day after, I left my house and my feet took me to the Jordan. In less than 20 minutes I was there. To my surprise they let me in without asking anything and I went to the lobby of the building without anyone bothering me. I had no idea who to ask, but then I saw him there in a huge room where patients were sitting and nurses were walking about. The whole thing looked like a five—star hotel. I looked around and I thought about asking one of the nurses (Ask what? Ask for a nameless writer? A writer named Pablo?) when he recognized me and addressed me as if time had not moved. "Hey kid!" he said as if we had talked the day before.

  "Hello, Good to see you!"

  "Come, come, sit here."

  I did not remember at all that he was Argentinean, and I think he wasn’t, although he started speaking in Spanish.

  Then he began praising himself.

  "Well, we are no longer the crazy fools of old, I am a famous writer, I’m a person, not that Ruiz you knew, a simple Ruiz, all doctors here call me Mr. Person, or Ruiz Person the writer."

  It didn’t sound like his name, maybe it was a pen name he had invented.

  "Ruiz is a surname?"...

  "Heh heh, of course, these are my two surnames, I keep my own name for my lovers. No one knows that one. And what I say is that you have to write with your balls, not with a pen, or a computer. That’s why my best novel is called Cock and Eggs … literally written with my balls. Cojones! And he shouted but nobody was surprised by that dirty word."

  The people around were very quiet. It gave the room a somewhat cinematic and dreamy air.

  "And what does that mean?"

  "So we get straight into the interview, because I imagine that you came to interview me. People only come to interview me, or view me, so let’s get on. What do you think? Come on... questions. I like questions."

  "When were you born?"

  "That is a question that you should never ask a writer. You should have learned that before you came. Well, I was born recently and I am very old. How about that answer? Hehehe, it is very poetic and political. What can be more political than that?"

  "What are you writing now?"

  "Another bad question. It’s been years since I have written anything, I just give interviews, and sell more and more books and I don’t have to write. I can just imagine. Journalists write."

  "Do you believe in the future of the novel?"

  "Ah! Yes! I believe in the future of the novel."

  "But don’t you think that electronic media will kill the novel?"

  "Yes, I think that too. But you have to kill the novel on a daily basis in order to create its future. Good sentence. Don’t you think so?"

  The truth is that luckily I did not come to interview him, because he became more unbearable.

  "Which character would you like to be?"

  "All. But mostly the blonde driver that Jack Kerouac hitchhiked. More than any other character."

  "And who is that?"

  "Well, in one of his books, called Blonde something, he gets into a car driven by a blonde. I love that blonde and she tells him that she is married, which is a lie, but that blonde, who is very smart, loves to play."

  "But out of the characters in your books."

  "None of them, I’m all of them and therefore I hate them, but they are parts of me that still exist in the books after they have killed me."

  "Do you want to resurrect any of them?"

  "Yes, many, especially the cook of the novel "The Wind and Pepper.’ I don’t remember his name but I would like him to prepare good paella for me."

  "Do you like paella?"

  "And reading also. I like to read."

  Suddenly a bell rang and everyone got up and headed in the same direction.

  "It’s time for medicine and after that, lunch. Someone said, "if you want you can return this afternoon."

  "Or tomorrow."

  "Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better. Because I want to take a siesta. No siesta, no life. Taking a siesta is never a waste of time. Better a siesta than a party. The siesta is the best time of the day. No siesta, no life."

  And he disappeared.

  4.

  I did not return that day, I went hom
e, I went down to the basement to find the books written by Ruiz Person, but I had none of them. I hardly succeeded in connecting to the internet with wi—fi connection, because it was too far from the router, and searched. Ruiz Person appeared in Wikipedia.

  Born in Las Pampas in 1967 and died in 1999 in Irxal. He has written two books: "The Cock and The Eggs" and "Wages Welding."

  That was all it said. Although it looked like they were talking about the same book, it was also clear that this was not the case. Also, I sensed that it was a joke of Pablo himself. So I searched for "The Cock and The Eggs" and there I found it. Yes I found it. Ruiz Person was a character in a novel by Pablo Pisces, a writer born in La Torreta who dies in Irxal in 2006. His death was perhaps a bit exaggerated, or a joke from some enemy or friend, or one from Pisces himself.

  And there was a list of his novels. Besides books of poems, stories, essays and philosophy, he had written 37 novels. Only a few appeared on Wikipedia:

  The Lifeless Baby

  The Murderer of No One

  Things Have Their Charm

  The Crisis of the Tartars

  The Destar Trilogy: Milo, Melon and Milonga.

  Minoestar Quartet: Lights and More Lights, Monday and Other Sundays, Tuesday Hopefully You Stay and The Shield of the Boar.

  5.

  In the basement and office, about 15 square meters, which could be a student’s room, I found one of his books, Nobody’s Baby and flipped through it and then I remembered that I already read it long ago, and what it was about. It was about a woman who had a baby aged six months and one day walking by the sea it rained, the mother quickly covered him and headed home to her mother, but on arrival there was no baby in the stroller and to her surprise the mother asks her what she is doing with a stroller with no child in it. The husband does not remember ever having a child, nor does anyone around her. The mother of the baby without a baby starts going crazy and lives between paranoia and hope, between psychologists and researchers. There is a plot of international child abductors, it is not clear whether they really exist or it is the pure imagination of the mother.