The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  PRAISE FOR RODRIGO FRESÁN

  “Rodrigo Fresán is the new star of Latin American literature. . . . There is darkness in him, but it harbors light within it because his prose—aimed at bygone readers—is brilliant.”

  —Enrique Vila-Matas

  “I’ve read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I’ve laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.”

  —Roberto Bolaño

  “A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendent of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.”

  —John Banville

  “With pop culture cornered by the forces of screen culture, says Fresán (knowing the risk to his profile of ‘pop writer,’ even coming out himself to discuss it), there’s nothing left but to be classic. That’s the only way to keep on writing.”

  —Alan Pauls

  Copyright © Rodrigo Fresán, 2014

  Translation copyright © Will Vanderhyden, 2017

  First published in Argentina as La parte inventada

  First edition, 2017

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-57-1

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  For Ana and Daniel:

  the real part

  Writing is not crypto-autobiography, and it’s not current events. I’m not writing my autobiography, and I’m not writing things as they happen to me, with the exception of the use of details—thunderstorms and that sort of thing. No, it’s nothing that happened to me. It’s a possibility. It’s an idea.

  —JOHN CHEEVER

  I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

  —NORMAN MACLEAN

  People say it’s not what happens in your life that matters, it’s what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event in your life could be something that didn’t happen, or something you thought didn’t happen. Otherwise there’d be no need for fiction, there’d only be memoirs and histories, case histories; what happened—what actually happened to you and what you thought happened—would be enough.

  —GEOFF DYER

  There’s a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life. [. . .] You learn to alter your life. [. . .] Everything in plain sight.

  —MICHAEL ONDAATJE

  We see parts of things, we intuit whole things.

  —IRIS MURDOCH

  No serious attempt will be made to enter into competition with reality.

  —ROBERT MUSIL

  Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona [. . .]. All of this is true. This book is really true.

  —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you’re writing about is really happening? I don’t think so.

  —JOSEPH HELLER

  It all really happened.

  —BRET EASTON ELLIS

  Indeed, it had now become hard for me to remember just how things really had happened.

  —CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  I’m not sure that what happened to me yesterday was true.

  —BOB DYLAN

  All this happened, more or less.

  —KURT VONNEGUT

  Nothing actually happened.

  —JAMES SALTER

  Always lie.

  —JUAN CARLOS ONETTI

  Can I call this a novel?

  —MARCEL PROUST

  This is not a pipe.

  —RENÉ MAGRITTE

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  THE REAL CHARACTER

  PART II

  THE PLACE WHERE THE SEA ENDS SO THE FOREST CAN BEGIN

  A FEW THINGS YOU HAPPEN TO THINK ABOUT WHEN ALL YOU WANT IS TO THINK ABOUT NOTHING

  MANY FÊTES, OR STUDY FOR A GROUP PORTRAIT WITH BROKEN DECALOGUES

  LIFE AFTER PEOPLE, OR NOTES FOR A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK AND SCIENCE FICTION

  MEANWHILE, ONCE AGAIN, BESIDE THE MUSEUM STAIRWAY, UNDER A BIG SKY

  PART III

  THE IMAGINARY PERSON

  I

  THE REAL CHARACTER

  Thursday, June 4th, 1959

  BIOY: You’d have to write about a writer’s initial steps. BORGES: Yes, but you’d have to do so exaggerating a little.

  —ADOLFO BIOY CASARES, Borges

  Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

  —DONALD BARTHELME, “The Dolt”

  How to begin.

  Or better: How to begin?

  (Adding the question mark that—nothing happens by chance—has the shape of a fish or meat hook. A sharp and pointy curve that skewers both the reader and the read. Pulling them, dragging them up from the clear and calm bottom to the cloudy and restless surface. Or sending them flying through the air to land just inside the beach of these parentheses. Parentheses that more than one person will judge or criticize as orthographically and aesthetically unnecessary but that, in the uncertainty of the beginning, are oh so similar to hands coming together in an act of prayer, asking for a fair voyage just now underway. We read: “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate;” we hear: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” And good luck to all, wishes you this voice—halfway down the road of life, lost in a dark woods, because it wandered off the right path—that the gag of the parentheses renders unknown. And yet—like with certain unforgettable songs, whose melodies impose themselves over the title and even over the signature lines of the chorus, what’s it called? how’d it go?—this voice also recalls that of someone whose name isn’t easy to identify or recognize. And, yes, if possible, avoid this kind of paragraph from here onward because, they say, it scares away many of today’s readers. Today’s electrocuted readers, accustomed to reading quickly and briefly on small screens. And, yes, goodbye to all of them, at least for as long as this book lasts and might last. Unplug from external inputs to nourish yourselves exclusively on internal electricity. And—warning! warning!—at least in the beginning and to begin with, that’s the idea here, the idea from here onward. Consider yourselves warned.)

  Or better still: To begin like this?

  And, just below, the following.

  Light made for making. The sudden yet not unanticipated appearance of a landscape.

  Moving from the general to the specific, to the individual, to the “hero” of the thing.

  The kind of beginning—the solid foundation and articulat
ion of an entire world on the page and between its lines, before its inhabitants make their entrance, moving left to right—considered obligatory for novels of the nineteenth century. Novels by authors who, in many cases, have been completely forgotten, but only after writing beginnings that remain unforgettable—anybody out there remember an author named Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a novel called Paul Clifford?—like “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” Novels that, in the twenty-first century, many readers—not too many, fewer all the time—explore with the joyful, retro-vintage wonder of someone who has to learn to breathe anew. To breathe like this: the way they breathed back then, opening and stepping inside one of those books that have the scent of book and not, as noted, the scent of machine and electric engine, of speed and lightness and short sentences, not for the wise power of synthesis but on the crass basis of abbreviation. To breathe differently, slowly and deep down inside. To breathe in books that readers, with any luck and if they’re lucky, will come to enjoy like the pure oxygen of a green forest after a long time lost in the black depths of a carbon mine. That forest, that place you should never have left and to which, welcome back, you return, running like only children can run. Like running children who are pure knee: their own knees the most important part of their body (always moving, always scraped) in an adult world, known fundamentally from the height of those fierce and loving giants’ knees. Like enlightened children who run, not yet thinking that someone is watching them run. Children who run, unaware that, unfortunately, for a total lack of fortune, there will soon be a uniform and a proper and respectable and harmonious way of running, for they’ll know themselves watched and judged and compared to other runners. But not yet. And to run is to read. And may you be of great velocity, you readers who run like you once ran, when you weren’t yet able to read but wanted to learn so badly, like a celebration of muscles and femurs and kneecaps and tibias and exhilarated laughter. Without shame or shyness or fear of what you’ll say and what you’ll see. Without the discomfort you’ll feel, a few years down the road, at early parties, at first dances. Dances that are like running in place: because all you really want is to stay still; but please, without our stillness being too obvious. And, so, adorning it with slight twitches of arm and leg and a disheveling spasm of head. All those tremors, those intimate little earthquakes on the edges of improvised monosonic dance floors in order to—it’s a little bit simian, really—digitize, with seeing eyes, intense as invisible fingers, what really matters: to tirelessly watch the way he or she moves. As if you were reading them. As if you wanted to memorize them, to recite later, alone, in the dark, lying down but as if running. That boy or that girl who moves so good, while we try to move the best we can. And to not think about how we’re moving, how ridiculous we look when we see ourselves dance, and maybe that explains the humiliating proliferation of mirrors in dance clubs, mirrors that quickly make you stop dancing and send you to the bar to spend a small fortune on successive colorful cocktails with too much water and ice. Something—watching ourselves dance, finding ourselves outside ourselves, to one side of ourselves, like those strange yet familiar objects you have to look at up close—as unsettling as hearing our own recorded voice, or discovering our profile in a photo. Or, it’s been said before, in one of those multiple-angle mirrors, when we force ourselves and are forced to try on and buy new clothes that never fit how we hope. Clothes that don’t change us, that aren’t a disguise, that only make us more ourselves, and so we groan. We sound like that? We look like that? Horrifying revelation: no, we do not look and sound how we think we sound and look. An effect similar to one you sometimes feel when you read something you wrote a long time ago. Something you understand as written, but can’t understand why and in what circumstances you wrote it. Or more horrifying and illuminating and even less comprehensible: you can’t understand how it was you were able to write something of that style. How is it possible to spend so much time learning how to write to end up writing something like that? No, please, say it isn’t so, that it didn’t come from us, that we never thought—and went so far as to write—something like that. And, presently, that is here again, like a ghost of Christmas past, to torment and ensnare us.

  But there’s still plenty of time to worry about these issues and, you’ll ask, what was the purpose or reason for opening the door to let such a digression come out and play. Easy but not simple: because that is how grownups think (jumping from one point to another, like drawing/connecting dots) when they feel particularly childish and allow themselves be carried off by gusts of ideas, like loose pages swept away by a storm. Better: that is how (and there are people who take drugs for years to try, without achieving it, to think like that for a while) more or less grown up writers think twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, to infinity and beyond. So, wanting to think like that for a little while; because if the effect is too prolonged, the whole thing loses its charm—and gets worn out and takes too much work—and then it doesn’t make any sense to say things like “You can’t imagine the trip I had.”

  But—here and now, so close, as close as everything that’s already happened—enough of this.

  Better: listen to the wind blow, though really the wind doesn’t blow.

  The wind does something else, something for which a precise, exact, correct verb hasn’t yet been created.

  The wind—more than blows—runs.

  The wind is running over itself.

  The wind is not circular; it is a circle.

  So—there we go, here we come, running—there’s a beach at the border of a place called Sad Songs. And there’s a boy running on this beach. A beach that opens onto a forest or a forest that opens onto a beach, depending on how you look at it, looking at the one, looking at the other. A deep and lush forest and a long and narrow beach that is, really, a thin line between water and salt and wood and chlorophyll. A line that’s about to be crossed by a boy.

  And, note: here it says “boy” when maybe it should say little boy—that oh so practical pairing of words that conflates size and age. But knowing already who and how digressive this little boy will be when grown up—and for reasons that have to do with transcendence and for the way it tends to prefer the most universal version of everything it touches and topples and breaks—it’d be better, just in case, “boy” . . . “The boy” . . . “The Boy” . . .

  And The Boy is at an age that’s hard to specify.

  The first of those ages/borderlands: between three and four years old or between four and five years old. That year—a perfect imperfection in the texture of time—which actually lasts two years, or something like that, a period when, all at once, so many things happen. The Boy’s features haven’t yet ceased to be the ones they’ve always been; but they’ve already begun to be the ones they’ll be until that second two-step—around eleven or twelve—from one territory to the next. So, staring at him produces the nauseating sensation of looking at a blurry photo, and, besides, The Boy never stops moving. Not even when he sleeps. The Boy is what’s known as “a restless child,” though the existence of a “restful child” has yet to be discovered; because it’s common knowledge that children only settle down, as if in a micro-trance, for the few seconds it takes them to decide where to take their restlessness and create unrest next.

  So here he comes. Running. Breathing through his mouth from the effort. As if he weren’t on his feet and moving, but actually sitting still. And yet, all the same, on his feet and moving. The same way he’d feel later on, holding any one of his many favorite novels. Eyes open wide, one of those books that, with time’s rapid passing, time’s running, charges you the entrance fee of learning everything all over again: a brand new game with rules and—you’ve been warned—a breathing all its own, a rhythm you have to absorb and follow if your goal is to climb up on the shore of the last page.

  And that beach, immortal, has been there for millennia; but it’s only been recognized for a few years (as many years as The Boy’s age) as
a beach for mortals, appearing in guidebooks for beachgoers and people who enjoy lying down to change color and mood under a sun that was once a precise clock or fiery deity for those who beheld and worshipped it. The beach is, then, one of those beaches between prehistoric and futuristic. A beach with no time, no nothing, no name. No billboard saying “This is a beach.” Not a single sign christening it with names as unoriginal as “New Atlantis” or “Sirens’ Point” or “Dulce Mar.” Its name simply that of the nearest town, which itself corresponds to some third-rate hero of the independence. And yet, The Boy’s parents, feeling themselves colonists and founders, insist on calling it La Garoupe, referencing that other beach for connoisseurs and that other exclusive couple, a great inspiration for the two of them. One and the other—famous beach and celebrity couple, fantasizing that their distant yet powerful radiations reach them, The Boy’s parents—far away in time and space and consciousness from The Boy, who will come to them soon, in a possible novel; but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s not run too fast and so far. Now, this beach, like one of those beaches where you might never have been, but that you probably drew at some point when you were a kid. A zone, white and horizontal, but never straight and true. A yellow sun overhead. Splashes of aquamarine for the sky and of sky blue for the aquamarine water. But no. This is not the blue known and pantheonized and trapped by the wood of pencils or the metal tubes of oil paints. It’s an ancient blue, a blue that has nothing to do with the blue children use to paint sky or water, or with the perfect blue of the greatest Indian gods. It’s a blue that’s always been there, and yet, for The Boy, there’s the sensation that all of this—like a tablecloth—is spread out every morning and folded up every night, like a stage that sets itself anew with each sunrise. One of those beaches that—able to raise and lower its temperature at will—could just as easily be an African desert as a Siberian steppe. Here the sea is not even the sea—it’s the mouth of a river opening into the sea. The water is not fresh, not salty, not—now you see it, up close—blue, not brown. The beach is white and wild and it’s midday, the precise hour when everything loses its shadow and gains body. And that’s the moment when, glowing, The Boy, to whom many adults ascribe a rather shadowy character, runs out of the dunes, which are sparse and small. Everything, as far as the eye can see, seems frozen in the exact instant of a flash. A postcard of red pupils slowly developed. There’s a rock outcropping and above it, yes, a deep forest. But the beach is narrow and seems to come to an abrupt end. More than a beach it’s the sketch of a beach, or of something that someone, after thinking about it a little or not much at all, decided to leave unfinished, moving on to look for another view to paint.