The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Is this the most important thing that’s happened to him yet?, The Boy wonders. (Who knows, he responds; and, at the other end of his story, decades later, he’ll say yes, when he realizes that the most transcendent events take place in the past but only happen in the future, when we’re truly cognizant of their importance, of the influence and weight they’ve had on everything that has and will come to pass. And it’s that which happens after that makes the before sad or happy. We need to know where we’re coming to in order to fully understand the texture of where we came from. We have to traverse great distances without precise compasses, dragging ourselves far and wide across an immense and simultaneously forever-fleeting present. But it’s during childhood that there’s the least separation between what is and what’s felt. There, the present is nothing but a narrow door separating the future from the past, and there’s no distance to reflect on it, because there’s so little experience to compare it to, there’s almost no space at all between what’s done and what’s perceived. Maps aren’t yet necessary and the possibility of monsters on their borders roars louder there, everywhere. And that—the sensation of an eternal moment—is something he’ll only experience a few times in his life, like variations on the same taste, the aforementioned taste of fear that loosens the baby teeth he’s not yet lost. The taste of waiting in a hospital emergency room, the taste of realizing you can’t live without someone, the taste of the real possibility of leaving it all behind, the taste of closing a book never to open it again, the taste of particle acceleration disassembling the puzzle of life in another century, another millennium. And The Boy can almost anticipate, predict all those fears to be trembled at, with the precision of a visionary, far away from any switch that could turn off such brilliance. A brilliance that’s strange and out of place, like a diurnal lightning bolt, like the ghost of a ghost. Again: maybe, when you die so young, what passes before your eyes isn’t everything you’ve lived but all the fears you never got to experience, all those fears that make you feel more alive than ever. Like how now, surprise, in the liquid center of terror, comes the inexplicable urge to laugh. (That slapstick reflex that forces us to think that there might be something funny about horror, like—on the plasma screen of a future TV—the vision of all those spectators and family members looking up at the sky and wondering for a few seconds, openmouthed and wide-eyed, if the Challenger is supposed to give off so much smoke and separate into so many parts, so suddenly, there above in the blue.) That’s how The Boy watches himself, like an in situ, in tempo catastrophe. (The Boy doesn’t know it yet, but he suffers from a slight but decisive cerebral anomaly, a result of r) a fall down the stairs in the home of his paternal grandparents. More an effect than a defect. Something that alters the rhythm of what’s called “persistence of vision”: his is slower, making him see everything in slow motion, image by image, frame by frame, word by word. Persistence of vision that, added to his eidetic or “photographic” memory, will end up—with time and according to critics and scholars—“having a decisive influence on his style and vision.”) So, all action like a freeze-frame that slowly unfreezes. Like those drawings on the borders or in the corners of the pages of some books that, flipped through rapidly, with the stroke of a thumb, seem to melt into a spasmodic flow, like an old silent movie where everyone appears to be walking across an electrified floor.

  And then—more of an attack mechanism than a defense mechanism; after all, he’s still a boy—The Boy forgets all of it.

  He erases all memory of things he’s not yet experienced (all those barely adult versions of those eternally childish questions); because now a shift in the water’s gears pulls him, as if on a raft, back toward the shore, to the continuation of his story, to his present life that lacks such complications and such long sentences and such inopportune parentheses. With the relief comes the forced amnesia, the obligation to forget everything he saw and understood. He senses he has to leave all of that in the water, throw it all overboard, to make up for the lack of wind in his sails and to be lighter.

  The Boy becomes who he was, who he must continue to be, so that, with the years, he can turn into who he was during the brief eternity of those two or three terrible and definitive minutes. The Boy has saved himself and has never experienced anything more gratifying than the feeling of the almost liquid mud lapping at the soles of his feet. The water is up to his neck, his chest, his waist, his knees, and he’s out, taking one or two or three steps and falling down next to his parents. On his back, breathing deeply, arms crossed, rays of sunlight like ecstatic pinpricks on his skin. It’s not that he’s happy. It’s something else. It’s beyond happiness—you have to pass through happiness and come out the other side to know what it is The Boy feels now—something that has no name. It’s the raw material that happiness, among other things, is made of. It’s that raw and primal happiness that, over the years, proves irretrievable, and its memory—like a happy bison on a Cro-Magnon cave wall—is all that’s left of it. A souvenir over which we superimpose, in vain, the whole succession of happinesses—diluted and convoluted with preservatives more artificial than natural—that will or won’t come, or that we’ll pass by or won’t know how to see, or that won’t ever even make it out of their caves. Happinesses that are false, in every case, like copies and imitations, like the postcards we resignedly pick up upon leaving the museum. Reproductions, falsifications. Believing that if you try hard enough, if you stare at them without blinking, the act of thinking about being happy can, for a while, convince us that we are happy.

  The Boy laughs, but he laughs not by laughing but by making a strange, loud sound. A unique and new laugh—the one he started to laugh when, eternal moments before, he thought it his best and last laugh—of someone who departed and has just returned from somewhere far away. The laugh of an extraterrestrial back on solid ground. The laugh of someone who has come back from the dead and lived to tell the tale, to write it down, and, then, alter it, improve it, add the invented part. The invented part that is not, not ever, the deceitful part, but the part that actually makes something that merely happened into something as it should have happened. Something (everything to come, the rest of his life, will spring from that there and then, from that exact moment) more authentic and valuable and pure than the simple and banal and often unsubtle and sloppy truth.

  The Boy’s laugh makes a lot of noise and, for once, his parents, annoyed and distracted—The Boy won’t let them read or debate—yell at him simultaneously.

  In complete agreement.

  In perfect synchrony.

  Magic. Abracadabra. The same word, a verb (that could be the name of a faraway place), and also a command and, in addition, an absurdity impossible for him to put in practice at the moment.

  But it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care.

  The Boy, with the laugh of a broken motor, happy to be running again, stands up and, still laughing, walks toward the trees, toward the house, and obeys.

  This is how it begins.

  Over the years (here and there and everywhere, in airports and hospitals and particle accelerators; in the ever-longer and more diffuse spaces that stretch out between one book and the next; before vanishing in order to be able to be in all places) the man who was once that boy, The Boy, will be asked the same question over and over again: “As a writer, where do you get your ideas?” An almost obligatory question, which he answers (which he’ll always answer) with eternal vagaries or certainties forgotten the next day.

  Then, unavoidably, unable to avoid it, when answering those questions, he’ll put on a parentheses face, he’ll invent something, anything, when answering how he invents the invented part. The invented part—an oh so insubstantial cloud that, nonetheless, manages to make the sun shut its mouth and stay quiet for a while—is nothing but a true shadow projecting itself across the real part.

  And between parentheses, once again, he’ll bring two more parentheses together.

  Like this:

  ()


  And the result has the shape of an aerodynamic vulva (he doesn’t like the word “vulva,” he’ll think as he thinks it; find another, he’ll write on the page).

  Or of the mysterious seed of what will one day germinate.

  Or of a future device yet to be turned on, inside his head, never to be turned off and to keep on working until his last day, ceaselessly broadcasting that signal, even though, more than once, he’ll try, in vain, to turn it off.

  Turn it on then.

  And what we see now is something that looks pretty much like this:

  The device and the vibrations it gives off.

  The concentric eccentric waves indicating the exact point in the pond where the rock we threw from here, from the eccentric present, just sank. And another childish but timeless question, also unanswerable: why, whenever we’re standing on the shore, do we feel that irrepressible and reflexive urge to throw a rock into the water? A mystery. A sneaking suspicion, yes. The rock is the cause and its waves the effect: what gets told based on what happened, the story before and behind History.

  The rock is the invented part that, subsequently, comes to form part of the truth.

  And, wearing that parentheses face, that writer who’ll always be that boy will wonder—in silence, within the absolute silence of those parentheses where no outside sound can get in and be heard, forever—why it is that they never ask him something far more important, or, at least, more interesting, than: “As a writer, where do you get your ideas?”

  Why do they never ask: “What made you want to be a writer?”

  The parentheses are the future.

  II

  THE PLACE WHERE THE SEA ENDS SO THE FOREST CAN BEGIN

  I

  The first thing they film, of course, is the library. Close-ups and wide shots and zoom-ins and zoom-outs where they can read titles but not names. Or vice versa. Though, of course, some legible titles automatically trigger the smaller-lettered name. Or the other way around. Action and reaction. Alpha and Omega. A serpent eating its own tail or strangling itself with it. Bookshelves upon bookshelves. And it’s worth wondering whether it’s the shelves that hold up the books or the books that hold up the shelves. Or both. Books standing up, books on the floor, books lying down, books lying down behind books standing up, books kneeling, books reclined and inclined, as if praying to other books above them, but below other still-higher books; despite the fact that their position means nothing and reveals less in terms of their quality and prestige and impact and how much they’re admired by those who read them. There are no clear hierarchies or obvious favorites; there is no alphabetical or chronological or geographical or generic order. All together now, all mixed together, and the books reach the ceiling and even climb the stairs like some kind of polychrome kudzu vine; turning the wooden stairway into a stairway of books that at one point came from wood. Books that came from wood and to wood they’ll return. Books shifting like ladders in an ascent without summit or terminus. Books climbing for nothing but the pleasure of continuing to climb and continuing to be read until the final step, not of a library but of a liferary—a life made of books, a life made of lives. Yes: the library like an organism, alive and in constant expansion, surviving owners and users alike.

  A library without precise limits, where you never find the book you are looking for, but always find the book you should be looking for.

  A library that, sometimes, lets itself fall (there are documented cases) and, while adding or removing a book, the owners are crushed to death, which is by no means a happy occurrence, though there are definitely worse deaths, more banal and less enlightened ways to die entombed.

  A library that, every so often, drops to the floor the ripe fruit of a book, as if it’d been pushed by the hand of a ghost or its owner, who isn’t a ghost exactly, but . . . And the book falls open and there you read, for instance, like right now, underlined years ago with one of those synthetic inks that highlight everything with an almost lunar glow, something like “Do not be cross because our characters do not always have the same faces; they are being true to life and death.” Or something like “There is folklore, myths, facts, and all the questions that remain unanswered.” And, next to that sentence, trapped in a comic strip speech-bubble not connected to any mouth, the irregular print, handwritten and small, but so readable and so read. The handwriting of someone who kept writing by hand despite the existence of increasingly light and smooth and plasmatic keyboards. The handwriting more of a mad scientist than a sane doctor (Slow Writer Sans Serif Bold?), adding, in red ink on the margin of the black on white quotation, a “And those unanswerable questions are nothing but the folklore and myths and facts of a private life, a very private life: PLEASE, DO NOT DISTURB.”

  A library of books covered in dust. And they say that domestic dust—90 percent of which is nothing but dead matter shed from human beings—is an important factor in the effective conservation of books. So, best to not dust them fully or frequently and, ah, poetic and literary justice—we shed ourselves so that our books may remain inviolate, and from the dust of our stories we come and to the dust covering our books we return. We return to a library—like all libraries—where we pause as if contemplating the noble ruins of a lost world or the raw materials of a world waiting to be discovered.

  A library where, every so often, by accident and as if in the aftermath of an accident, disoriented by the shock of impact, someone arrives for whom books and, above all, the accumulation of books is an unfathomable mystery. Because for many people, books get used up and worn out and it makes no sense to keep them. They take up so much space, you have to store them, and they’re heavy, and oh so dirty, and though no one would say it out loud, they’re too cheap to really be something good and good for you. And, so, a library that might well provoke its accidental visitors—with an odd mixture of respect, unease, and contempt, as if referring to invulnerable and abundant cockroaches, a plague, or a virus—to ask you “But seriously, you’ve read all these books?” Visitors ask this because they don’t dare ask themselves the questions they really don’t want the answer to: “How is it that I’ve read so few books? How is it that there are barely any books in my house and that most of them are books of photos, some with photos of houses that also have libraries where there are barely any books except books of photos, and why instead of books, books of writing, do I have so many photos of people whom I should presumably love unconditionally but who, to tell the truth, when I think about it a little, after a few drinks, seem to be real, authentic . . .?” They’re the same uncouth tourists—never surprised by the quantity of crosses in churches or bills in banks or food in markets—who seem so amiable and pleased and presumably interested, but maintaining a safe distance from the troubling local fauna, when, in the next breath, they ask you “What are your books about?” And, yes, it’s for these people that the electronic book has been invented, which—hallelujah and eureka!—has succeeded in putting television and print in communion: to download and not load down, to acquire and accumulate and never open, never turn a single page. And so that—so pleased that two thousand titles can be held in one hand—the books aren’t there all the time, in view, their deafening silence a reminder of all you haven’t and won’t ever read. All those horizontal and vertical lines, full color and black and white. And the answer to the previous question (the envious incredulity that someone has been able to consume and process all that paper and ink) is “Yes, I have read all of them . . . Got a problem with that?” And, at the same time, the answer is no. Because there are books you buy to save for the future, as if you were stashing away food for a great drought or a new ice age. Or to cling to or to cover yourself with, in the pods of a spaceship, searching for a new home, while outside everything explodes and fades away and goes out. Books that, though they haven’t been read and, maybe, won’t ever be read, perform a critical, indispensable function: they are the past and the future and also the present of imagining (another form of reading, after all) what
they tell, what they’re about. Not of judging them, but intuiting or divining them from their covers, the photos and brief biographies of their authors, and the synopses written on their broad or not-so-broad backs and inside their slim or not so slim flaps. Books that, after a while, though they haven’t been read or might never be read, exude a telepathic fragrance that has an odd effect on their owners: giving them the feeling that, at night, when they’re asleep, these books tell each other their stories in the softest, yet most deafening of voices and that, yes, it’s like you’ve toured and traveled through them and admired them without ever wanting or needing to open them. Sometimes, you think, it’s enough to look at a book—to stare at it—to feel that you’ve already read it. Without reading it. The Japanese even have a word to capture this symptom and state of mind: tsundoku, to buy a book and not to read it, watching books collect and pile up, until the tsundoku grows into a tsunami, and even then . . . But for this to happen or to be felt, first you have to buy the book. Such black and white magic isn’t achieved in public bookstores but in private libraries, alone, now you see it now you don’t.