The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Besides, the father’s and mother’s chosen book isn’t the most appropriate for the times that are passing, for the times that they’re dragging themselves through. A book that begins on a beach and narrates—in exquisite detail, with painful elegance—the simultaneously vertiginous and gradual apocalypse of a marriage, envied and deemed perfect by many. The book is, also, an indisputable classic. Which means neither of them can stop reading it; but both fantasize that the other tires, surrenders, or retreats in terror from the cruel and revealing mirror of those pages. Give up. And leave me in peace to read it on my own and by myself, right? None of that for the moment. And his father identifies with the novel’s male protagonist and his mother also identifies with the novel’s male protagonist. Because the novel’s female protagonist, the male protagonist’s wife, is mad or, if you prefer, “disturbed”: that subtle and elegant and polite and somewhat vintage way of saying that someone is completely and absolutely batshit insane. And both protagonists suffer equally. And, in the opening pages, they are on a beach. And she’s too mad for a beach to make her “feel good.” Or maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe The Boy’s father and mother identify with her and not with him; because it’s distinctly possible that he has something to do with her madness. Or maybe the lack of clarity and precise identification is related to the different editions and translations that they’re reading. The father’s copy has the photo of an old-fashioned swimmer on the cover; the mother’s has the touristic poster of a beach on the Côte d’Azur. And the father and mother don’t know it yet, but they’re reading different versions of the same novel in the same way that they’re writing different versions of their marriage and the imminent allegations of their defense and/or prosecution. Because the book’s author decided, almost desperate, just before dying, to alter the temporal flow of the plot—which wasn’t initially linear, but sinuous, present and past and present—and to reorganize it chronologically. To see—he’d just put so much work into those pages and nobody seemed that interested in them, considering them a successful failure or something like that—if, that way, the novel improved, if it was appreciated more, if it sold better. His instructions were followed post-mortem by his literary executor. The new version was considered inferior and he reverted to the original, to the one that—just like real time—moves forward and backward and forward again. But for a few years, in English and in translation, both versions existed at the same time. And The Boy—when he was no longer a boy, when he was able to read and compare them, multiple times—was never sure which his mother had read and which his father had read. Who moved straight and true from past to future and who was left spinning in place. It doesn’t really matter, he’ll think. What matters now is, yes, the absence of his backward-walking tin toy, and that his father calls his mother “Zelda” and his mother calls his father “Zeldo.” With toxic affection. And, when The Boy asks why they call each other that, they tell him that it has to do with the book, with the characters in the book, with the book’s author and his wife, who are like the characters in the book, though not exactly. The revelation that nonfiction and fiction can be one and the same gives The Boy a massive headache, more or less the same kind of pain that, as mentioned, movies with space-time storylines will also give him. A beatific and Jesuitical aura, another question to archive alongside * Superman and * King Kong and * fat women and * the powerful odor of asparagus in urine. And maybe, he’ll think, it’s all because his parents miss their toys too. Because his parents have more toys than he does, he thinks: silver pillows, plastic masks, glass contraptions full of colored liquids that rise when enveloped by the warmth of a hand, pendulums of multiple balls that strike each other one by one or two by two or three by three, a blue wave held captive inside an acrylic rectangle that rocks back and forth, exotic musical instruments that they don’t know how to play, but that are so pleasing to look at, psychedelic kaleidoscopes, lamps of cold lava; and who knows what other toys they have hidden away, under lock and key.

  Here and now, in the absence of all of that, his father and mother start once again to argue. To “debate,” they prefer to say. And The Boy covers his ears to keep from hearing what he can’t stop hearing. Ears covered with hands, he knows, is not necessarily a wish granted.

  So The Boy decides to get away and go out into the water. Before going in he touches his bathing suit, as if checking over his superhero uniform. It’s blue with a small white anchor and it fits him the way bathing suits fit all children—very well. He is still far from adolescence and further still from the prime of youth (when bathing suits can fit really badly, and it’s oh so vital that they fit really well), or from old age (when they always fit really badly, but nobody cares anymore). The Boy enters the water like someone entering an unfamiliar place. With caution, cold and hot. And, the water up to his waist, he brings a hand to his mouth and tastes a—might such a word exist, might it belong to the same language as onvacation?—saltysweet taste. Behind him, his parents are still “debating.” Random sentences reach him. Like pieces of torn letters, difficult to read. Like letters ripped apart by someone who barely reads them and later attempts to put them—torn and in tatters—back together to read again, fantasizing about the impossibility that maybe now they’ll say something different. And it’s the distinctive sound more than the diffuse yet easily graspable meaning of those stray words that disturbs The Boy. Things are not going well. Things are getting worse. And among all those stray words there’s one that appears more and more frequently. A shy word. A name more uncommon than rare: Penelope. His mother sings it, mockingly: because the name came from a song. His mother says it over and over and, each time she pronounces it, she instinctively raises her hand to her belly and caresses it or gives it a few light taps or points at it. The name “Penelope” produces a different effect in his father: he hears it and stares at the mother’s belly—as if he were penetrating it with Krypton rays—and then looks up at the sky and closes his eyes. Penelope—it’s clear, much clearer than the water there before him—is already, though invisible and miniscule, a powerful presence that makes everything around her, his mother and father, unsettled and nervous. His mother: nausea, dizziness, insomnia, rapid fluctuations in body temperature, and sudden changes in blood pressure. And his father: nausea, dizziness, insomnia, rapid fluctuations in body temperature, and sudden changes in blood pressure. Penelope is a volatile reactant. Problematic Penelope is a problem even before being born. Penelope—enfant du hasard, Sarah and Gerald Murphy, the vague inspiration for the very novel that his mother and father are reading, would have said, on another beach, in imported yet admirable French—wasn’t planned. Penelope wasn’t planned and yet . . . The Boy—an exhausted and exhausting experience—was more than enough to make them parents; to level-up in the videogame of life, to perpetuate the race, and keep their family name alive; to be hip among hip young parents. Being a young parent, at that time, at least for a while and out of the blue—really out of the blue—has the same charm as dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse. But without having to die. Being a parent makes you legendary for a very brief period of time. But it’s better than nothing, and how many times does life give you the opportunity to feel seriously legendary and a true creator? The problem—the problem of Penelope, the problem that is Penelope—is that it’s no easy thing to settle who has the blame and who is to blame: the spermatozoid or the ovum? So, then, their words—including the name “Penelope”; because even though the exact technology doesn’t exist yet and not enough months have passed to fire waves into the mother’s belly and bounce them off the guest and send back the echo of an image and a sex, they already know it’s a girl and that she’ll be called Penelope in honor of that popular song—increase in volume and intensity. And they escalate into tuneless yelling. Here we go again, father and mother yelling, yelling at each other.

  Which propels The Boy away from the shore, out into the water.

  And he tries not to think about what happened last night.<
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  About the thing with the knives.

  Something The Boy would like to believe was a dream, but knows was not. And that now, in his memory, has the unforgettable clarity of one of those laminated illustrations from fairy tales and witch tales, right-hand pages facing left-hand pages, overpowering the as-yet meaningless letters.

  There, yesterday, in his bed, in the darkness broken by the light from the hallway. And, first his father and then his mother, staring at him, thinking that he’s asleep. (In the future, he’d read in a novel that parents start as gods and end up myths, and that, between one extreme and the other, the human forms they adopt tend to be catastrophic for their children.) So, now, divine and devouring and already catastrophic, his mother and father, silhouettes in the room’s doorway, holding knives in their hands. Big dangerous knives. Mother and father clutching those knives and maybe thinking, The Boy thinks, about whether or not they’re going to do it, about whether they’ll dare do it, while he pretends to be submerged in boyhood dreams, so he can remember everything, forget nothing. Because, for a while longer, his memory is still the implacable and miraculous and reliable memory of a boy with little to remember. A memory still safe from the forgetfulness that will come with high school; when and where his previously infinite recall capacity will constantly be tested with names of heroes whose uniforms are far more boring than those of superheroes, with mathematic tables, dates of battles, and useless equations that’ll never be of any use to him, but that might serve the secret function of burying primordial matters and more essential lessons under an avalanche of public and external information. Unforgettable and instantly memorizable lessons like the one from the night before. The lesson of the two knives. The lesson that for a few seconds fills his eyes with tears, but, luckily, there’s nothing “used up” more quickly than tears—hot under his eyelids and then, a few centimeters below, already cold on his cheeks. Those parents, his parents, are like the parents in those stories who take their children into a forest and abandon them—once upon another time, there can always be once upon another time—so they can go back to living happily ever after.

  The Boy doesn’t know how to swim yet—he’ll learn to read and write before he learns to swim—and won’t know how for many years. His sporting specialty is drifting along on solid ground, crossing and lying down in dry riverbeds, intuitively understanding floor plans and blueprints of houses and apartments. He is, yes, a city boy. Not only does he not know how to swim; The Boy doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle, kick balls with any precision, or climb trees. So, ah, the intoxicating sensation of doing something new, something he doesn’t know how to do yet, but might along the way. Step by step, feeling how the swelling strangeness of the river spilling into the sea wraps around his ankles. Then the water is up to his chest, his neck, his chin.

  And then something happens.

  The Boy feels it, but doesn’t understand it. The perpetual motion motor of the—and again, could this word, a close relative of onvacation and saltysweet exist?—riversea changes gears, accelerates. And, suddenly, his feet no longer touch bottom. The Boy remembers a TV commercial. Black and white—barely four channels back then—and maybe that’s why black and white is the color of his nightmares: black and white is much more frightening. In the commercial—an advisory notice, filmed in first person POV—a person enters the sea, on a crowded beach. You hear the sound of people on the sand and the heavy breathing of someone swimming in water that is too deep. Now you also hear the sound of a whistle, warning the swimmer he’s gone too far from shore. And, all of a sudden, the swimmer starts to shriek, to flail, to thrash the water—a few drops land on the camera lens, his eyes—around him in terror, and, yes, to drown. The swimmer goes under several times, comes back up for air, screams for help, gasps, and, in the end, is reclaimed by the abyss that subsequently fades to black, to darkness. Then a startling voice says something about being careful when going in the water, something like that.

  Something similar happens to The Boy now, but in color, colors so brilliant they hurt his pupils, and nobody—no whistle or shouts, only the distant monotone buzz of his parents’ “debate”—even notices. Extra! Extra! The Boy is drowning. He swallows water. He spits water. He sinks to the bottom and, from there, kicks off hard and returns to the surface. There’s an airplane in the sky, he can see it, could they see him from up there? Looking out of one of those circular windows, thinking: “Look, down there, it looks like that boy is drowning . . . Do we tell the flight attendant so she can tell the captain so the captain can do something?” There’s a sky and an airplane and The Boy fills his mouth with oxygen, oxygen that won’t last long. Just long enough for the automatic reflex and defense mechanism of imagining himself there above, far away, flying, grownup and looking out the little window and wondering if that little stain of color in the turgid water that is him might be a someone in trouble. An airplane like something to hold on to, to keep from sinking. And airplanes carry life preservers under their seats. But they won’t be any help: he’ll be too tired soon; he won’t last much longer.

  And The Boy is not (again, The Boy’s references are still limited and fundamentally childish, though exceedingly multipurpose, already foreshadowing the possibility of a consummate referential maniac) like the beaten but unbreakable ACME-brand-sponsored Coyote. Like this, the coyote feels just like this—thinks The Boy, and he paddles and pedals the invisible bicycle of wet submarine air—when he discovers that the ground is no longer there; that he has gone out too far in pursuit of the Roadrunner; that there’s nothing out there but the total nothingness of the precipice and the long vertical fall, a fall he’ll survive just so he can fall again, condemned to being unbreakable just to keep on being beaten.

  And no, that isn’t The Boy’s case, beyond the innumerable “accidents” he’s already lived through: right now he’s a fragile boy and his time is running out. And children’s time tends to be brief; even though, sometimes, they make it seem so elastic, almost eternal. And his life has been so short that there’s not enough archival material to carry out that obligatory projection; the one where “in the moment of death your entire life passes before your eyes in a matter of seconds.” Because, instead, what occurs is a capricious change of film. Fear is impossible to command; fear doesn’t follow orders.

  And what The Boy watches now—as if he were sitting in a movie theater, just after that traumatic moment between the previews and the beginning of the movie when some pale old women walk through the rows of seats, collection boxes in hand, collecting coins for a foundation that looks after orphans and the homeless—is the blockbuster of everything that might happen if he makes it out of this predicament alive.

  The Boy remembers, imagines himself in a movie theater. The Boy is happy, ready to receive his dose of illustrated and animated joy. And suddenly, more cartoons, everything becomes a little less Mickey Mouse (not the atypical and disobedient Mickey Mouse of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but the same, though he wouldn’t dare say it, goody-goody and kind of obnoxious Mickey Mouse as always, so much duller than the hysterical Donald Duck) and everything becomes a little more . . . a little more Bambi. Here the Coyote’s explosives and perpetual resurrections don’t matter. Here everything is somber, and Dickensian; The Boy doesn’t know what Dickensian is yet, but he’s suffered through it already with Oliver! The Boy is alone in his seat. And before the movie starts, that other commercial, more frightening than the drowning one. A commercial that’s not an advisory notice, but a solicitation. A commercial designed to raise funds for a children’s foundation. There, on the screen, a lost boy, holding onto the railing of a bridge that spans a highway. A national Oliver. Face streaked with tears and dotted with snot, a popular singer’s plaintive voice crooning lines like “In this exact moment . . . / There’s a boy in the street / There’s a boy in the streeeeet.” And what frightens The Boy more than anything isn’t the lost and abandoned little boy to whom he’d give all his toys in a heartbeat, except for hi
s little traveling tin man. And, no: what worries him isn’t that he’ll end up like that boy in the street, what worries him is “In this exact moment . . .” That terrifying precision. And the fact that—especially since it’s the first show of the afternoon, the matinees or early shows tending to be the ones The Boy frequents—there’s always somewhere, according to that song, no matter what time it is, where everything is, exactly, that dark. And that that darkness—a darkness The Boy sometimes, always a surprise, discovers upon leaving the movie theater, in the winter, when the sun goes down so early on Sundays, as if accelerating the arrival of Monday and the return to classrooms—can find you. It’s a contagious and sticky darkness, a darkness that you step on like a piece of chewing gum, so hard to dislodge from the sole of your shoe later on. A darkness with no timetable. Like right now, though scarcely past midday, a flash of shadow dazzles and illuminates him in the Cinemascope of that beach. Suddenly, The Boy sees everything. He understands everything all at once. Like when leaving a movie you stop in front of the movie theater doors. Back then, movie theaters (by the time The Boy leaves behind his long adolescence, this custom won’t exist anymore; just like scratched copies of movies, out of focus movies, movies with asynchronous sound and image, or movies that burst into flames like vampires under the light of projectors won’t exist), in addition to the movie’s poster, also exhibited stills from the movie. Moments that someone considered ideal for attracting the indecisive, tempting them to enter. Photos like illustrations from books that don’t help you understand what they’re about or what story they tell. Photos that The Boy looks at again when he leaves, after the movie is over. (Photos that before long won’t be of animated animals, but of actors and actresses. A young woman with a dress made of little metal pieces. Another young woman—even younger than the last, closer and nearer—in a cemetery under the rain. A man riding a camel. And monkeys and monoliths and spaceships frozen in the amber of a frame that someone specially selected to tempt passersby.) Photos from which The Boy had already deduced a plot the moment he entered and that now, before going home, he repositions in the order of a story that often ends up being more disappointing than the one he’d imagined before the lights came down and the screen lit up. He understands now—looked at from a distance, as if they too were photos from a movie he just watched—that his parents . . . are just a couple of scared kids, because they’re only now realizing that they aren’t kids anymore, they’re grownups! And that they don’t want, don’t know how, to be grownups! And that they never really will! And that, no matter how many toys they buy so they can keep on playing, nothing will save them from that reality! They’ll be, at best, wrinkled children with porous and brittle and breakable bones! Right now! In the street! On the beach! In the water! There’s a boy! In trouble! The force of that revelation takes his breath away, makes him long to go onvacation forever, to drink the water, to swallow the water, to fill himself up with the water and overflow, as if his body were a vessel. To successfully premiere, to great critical acclaim, something that previously—watching a movie or trembling from a clap of thunder or reacting to the slap of a scream or the scream of a slap—The Boy has only had small previews of, brief trials of: the taste of fear, the taste of his heart beating everywhere, the runaway taste of his heart in his mouth. An aftertaste between metallic and carnal. Someone might point out that that is the taste of the adrenaline distilled by the body. But no, it’s something else. It’s as if the adrenaline were radiating throughout his entire body, as if it were shaping it.