The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A library that’s been organized to survive on the margin, but not in the margins of those photographs of pages, those repositories of written words. Devices that you can’t smell or lend or steal or throw against the wall; that don’t even allow for a surprise re-encounter with something (note or photo or snippit) inside; that won’t even help us understand someone’s nature when, having just arrived to someone’s house, we go into their library to scan the titles, as if decoding the unconscious stains of one of those psychological tests, and even in movies, every time a library makes an appearance, we crane our necks trying to decipher the vertical names on the horizontal shelves.

  A library with too many incarnations of Tender Is the Night and Tierna es la noche or—according to the translation—Suave es la noche, and even one Tendre est la nuit and Ночь нежна and Yö on hellä and Zärtlich ist die Nacht and and Tenera è la notte, all of them by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and by Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджepaльд and by .

  A library where, as a kind of decoration, as if punctuating the discursive flow of the books, there are also: a first edition LP (sealed, wrapped in a black case, never opened) of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here; a relatively new yet instantly vintage digital camera (with one of those stickers—the kind stuck on old travel trunks on its metal side that says “Abracadabra”); and a small and primitive and timeless tin toy. A little windup man, carrying a suitcase, with no need for batteries or switches. One of those objects seemingly designed to provoke in everyone who sees it the irrepressible urge to pick it up. And to turn the key protruding from the suitcase. And to make it walk. And, surprise: falling under its spell, the bewitched will soon discover that this toy (a defect, or maybe not), instead of moving forward, moves backward, that it only runs in reverse, as if retracing its own trajectory. And, next to the toy, a postcard reproduction of a painting that shows a clock with its insides spilling out. Springs and gears, cubist curves and, better, it’s high time to start the engines of the story that’ll be told here and press play and record and look into the viewfinder like someone spying through the keyhole of a door that opens right here.

  And, moving across the library, camera in hand (along one wall there’s an enormous corkboard with an infinity of small papers pinned up like butterflies, where quotes by writers are written. Two come into focus: “Writing fascinates me because I love the adventure inherent in starting any text, because I love the abyss, the mystery of that line of shadow beyond which lies the territory of the unknown, a space where everything is suddenly very strange, especially when we realize, like children with language, that we have to learn everything all over again, the difference being that, when we were children, it seemed to us that we could learn and understand everything, whereas when we are at the age of the line of shadow, we see that the forest of our doubts and questions will never be illuminated and, in addition, that all we’ll encounter from here onward are shadows and darkness. So the best we can do is keep moving forward, though we understand nothing . . . The books that interest me are the ones the author started without knowing what they were about and finished the same way, in the half-light.—E. V-M.” and “All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home. Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?—R. B.” And a poster with a sloppy but effective cut-up/collage: Edward Hopper’s painting Room by the Sea with the foamy and salty crest of by Katsushika Hokusai hanging out its door). The first thing the young woman says is something like “Ugh, I hope we don’t open by showing the books and the desk and all of that.” And the young man, watching the young woman watch, film (or record?, thinks the young man, who has the constant propensity to correct and edit himself), says something like “Don’t worry: it’s the first thing we’re filming and recording; but it won’t be the first thing that’ll be seen in the film.” And then the young man shuts his mouth; why does referring to what they’re making as “the film” sound a little pretentious even to him?

  So, what will be first then? What will be shown first so it’s the first thing seen? What will they open with? With that toy, as a wink to the writer’s oft-cited phrase about how “The past is a broken toy that each of us has to fix in our own way?” Or with the study’s circular window that gives the impression of being inside a kind of space pod with views of a curtain of pine trees, their backs to a shelf of water and sand, to Jupiter and on to infinity? Or better, with the pure and unadulterated landscape. A landscape is always a good opening. The exact place: the sea, the forest, that line that is the precise point—the period and new sentence—where the sea ends so the forest can begin. And over the piles and beams and stairways of wood and concrete and steel, the house that, when the tide rises, is transformed for a few hours into an island the way Cinderella mutates into a dancing protoprincess at midnight. As if by the magic of art.

  The young man (The Young Man, from here onward; read and perceive his capital letters, even if you do so in a hushed voice, as if the letters were experiencing a slight shift of atmospheric pressure, of existential intensity, like when an elevator takes off all of a sudden and we’re in the middle of a sentence and then whoops!) thinks that it’d be a good idea to set the camera up on a tripod and record and open with exactly that—the sea rising around the small dock. A dock like an unfinished bridge, like a path that someone just traced in their mind, thinks The Young Man; but he doesn’t dare say this, not to her. He says yes, he finds the energy to say yes, that they could use that place, that scene, later on, sped up, as a credits sequence. The tide rising and isolating the house that suddenly seems to be floating on top of the water. “It’s not bad . . . But it should be at sunrise or sunset, right?” the young woman suggests (The Young Woman, from here onward; read and perceive her curving capital letters, even if . . .), acting like she’s doing him a favor, like she’s granting him his last wish. And, to make the idea a little bit hers, so he doesn’t get all the credit, The Young Woman adds: “Plus, it fits well with what he was saying about the way he changed his approach to writing and his style. About how in the beginning, when he started writing, he just waited for ideas to come to him fully formed, like passengers at the end of the dock; and then, later on, the difficulty and challenge and doubt of having to go searching for them under the sea, to rent a boat and row out and put on a scuba suit and go down and pull them up from the depths and put them together like the debris of a shipwreck, right?”

  “He” is the writer (The Writer; read and perceive and blahblahblah and whoops!), the subject of their documentary (the film). And The Young Man, with an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel, but has learned to fake to the point of almost believing it himself whenever he’s with her, says: “True. Perfect. Great idea.” The Young Man is always trying to guess what The Young Woman is thinking; to anticipate her ideas and desires. But it’s no simple task, it’s hard work: it’s like trying to guess a song that’s playing somewhere nearby from nothing but its bass line, reverberating off walls and floors, from a long time ago, in another age.

  The Young Man is six months younger than The Young Woman. It’s not a decisive difference and definitely not insurmountable, clearly, The Young Man and The Young Woman now being halfway down the road and in that nebulous area without reliable maps, somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. But to The Young Man those six months seem a terrible and definitive six months. Like those months so long ago: like when he was still ten years old and she’d turned eleven and he was watching her from the opposite shore, something growing at the height of her breast, under her dress. A breast that’s changing and pluralizing—breasts. As if that part of her body had been submitted to a bizarre experiment with gamma rays or something like that. And all he can do is watch it, watch them, watch her, she, who’s someone else now, while he’s still the same as always,
or even worse—he, at that time, is even smaller because she’s already grown bigger. That’s how he feels as he watches her now, The Young Woman, breasts and all. More than watch her, he contemplates (a much more poetic verb, they say) her, as if he were appraising, with a mix of fear and admiration, a natural phenomenon that’s drawing ever nearer. And that, it’s easy to anticipate, will lay waste to everything. And, especially, to that poor boy who waits with eyes wide and mouth open, smiling who knows why, almost flying through the air, pulled away by the spiraling winds. The Young Woman leaves The Young Man speechless or bestows on him a kind of eloquence where everything he says is nonsense. The Young Woman takes The Young Man’s breath away or suffocates him. Either way, though it’s not exactly the same thing.

  Aha! The Young Man is in love with The Young Woman. An unrequited love that, he thinks, is something like what people who have lost an arm or leg must feel. Not the ghost of something there then gone, but the ghost of something never possessed yet oh so longed for. That violent and sad love, downfall of the greatest monsters. Of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster and The Mummy and The Phantom of the Opera and The Werewolf and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Fly and King Kong and so many other mutants who succumb to the most passionate radiation of all those Beauties. A love that’s not blind, but does hallucinate. A love that’s not wrong, but that is, from the beginning, an error. A love that’s badly aimed and only hits its target when it misfires, when it ceases to be love in order to have been love and can be looked at from a certain distance and, accordingly, discovered to have always been an unrequited love.

  And The Young Woman is not in love with The Young Man; because The Young Woman saves her love for nothing more and nothing less than the Great Themes. For ART. For LITERATURE, for all the capital things she thinks about in ALL CAPS. Caps not limited to initials. Caps that reach the middle and final letters too, and even get surprised by the lack of capitalized punctuation symbols. Look at them: The Young Man and The Young Woman are literary animals. They live to read literature and dream of making a living off of a literature based in reading. And they know that modernism (when anything was possible), postmodernism (when everything had been worn out), and post-postmodernism (when, since everything had been worn out, anything was possible) have already passed. And so, now, they’re waiting for the new thing, for what’s next, for their own moment and the corresponding era that corresponds to them. Like those surfers at sunrise, on top of their boards waiting for the perfect wave, The Young Man and The Young Woman know their golden moment is approaching: the possibility of attaining the beach, triumphant and chosen, releasing rodeo-cowboy whoops while here comes the sun to illuminate everything, to make everything beautiful just because it’s illuminated.

  The Young Woman possesses a beauty that, when The Young Man is feeling between lyric and epic, he likes to think of and describe to himself as the kind of beauty that could lay waste to empires. The kind of beauty that—in order to transcend a bas-relief on the wall of a ruined temple—needs the madness or inspiration of one or more men to make it legendary, to leave its name in History. But that’s not true; it’s just what The Young Man wants. A vain and pointless attempt to convince himself that he’s the man who’ll raise her to the heavens and turn her into a constellation and a legend. Really, lacking a better adjective (and because of the added automatic reflex of the Clark Kentian glasses she wears and—secretly—doesn’t need), The Young Woman’s beauty might be best described as indie. The Young Man also has an indie look. Which is pretty much like saying that The Young Woman is beautiful and The Young Man is not. The Young Woman is the personification of feminine grace. The Young Man is funny. The Young Woman has been blessed by the gifts of the universe. Everything and everyone who meets her, when they meet her, think, generationally: “Uh, she’s like a mix of Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway.” But really she’s something else, something better, more classical and more modern. The French have the perfect word—both in its letters and sound—to define her nature. What was it? Ah, yes: “gamine.” The Young Woman is very gamine. The Young Woman is like Audrey Hepburn in a role—a young girl gets a job at The New Yorker and runs into Salinger and Capote and Cheever in the elevators?—Audrey Hepburn was never offered: that of an exquisitely un-fair lady whose hobby is breaking hearts into tiny pieces without doing anything. Hearts that, when stepped on by her high-and sharp-heeled shoes, sound exactly like eggshells underfoot. Or, more precisely, like the little bones of very soft and fragile animals, delicate organisms that would never even survive the instantly-disposable sketch of a possible animated drawing. And as The Young Woman walks by, hearts tremble and split apart, all on their own, as if self-destructing. Next to her, lackluster, The Young Man is nothing but an entertaining, sympathetic caricature. Like one of those characters in millennial comics where the superhero has been replaced by the antihero; where there’s no place for physical or mental powers anymore; and all that’s left is a guy with his hands in his pockets and a two-day beard, walking down the street of a fishing town, and—the hook buried deep—being dragged into the depths of a dive bar, the only bar that stays open in the offseason.

  But odder couples have ended up loving each other in some of the great minor successes of indie cinema; so The Young Man thinks all is not lost, and wants and needs to believe it. The Young Woman doesn’t think about such things, she doesn’t believe in those movies and, even less, in the barely alternative songs on their soundtracks. More than that—The Young Woman doesn’t even consider herself indie. The Young Woman prefers to think of herself more as vintage, like the wayward daughter of a functionally dysfunctional Zen Jewish family, with a monosyllabic surname that sounds like a brand, and various child prodigies. Despite the fact that, yes, The Young Woman’s parents flaunt two lengthy patronymics of Calabrian origin, like a shrill and shrieking operetta. Surnames that, put together, one after the other, make everyone who hears them laugh. And then they ask her to repeat them, over and over again—The Young Man, too (but just the once, because he saw what it did to The Young Woman and . . .). So, for reasons more than obvious, The Young Man avoids the subject of names and surnames in her presence. For The Young Woman, on the other hand, The Young Man’s surname is perfect. And she’ll never forgive him for it; because there are times when The Young Woman feels it might be possible to fall in love with something as volatile as a surname. A surname that, alone and when nobody can see her think it, she’s dared to try out with her own name and found that it fit just right. A surname that, combined with her name, would be a great name for a writer.

  The Young Man and The Young Woman discuss some technical details; technical details that just a few generations back would’ve required several years of university training to understand and that now seem as natural as chewing and swallowing. Something instinctive and intuitive, a rapid dance of fingers across a keyboard or a screen that, if you let it, will even speak to you and give you instructions, like an oracle, with a metallic and chrome voice.

  The Young Man and The Young Woman speak in low voices, voices that bow their heads and hunch their shoulders to seem and sound lower still. The Young Man and The Young Woman speak in low voices because they don’t want—they’re afraid—Penelope to hear them. The writer’s sister. The Writer’s Sister from here onward. Or better: The Madwoman. Or even more apt: The Mad Sister. The Writer’s Mad Sister. The Writer who’s missing and yet present everywhere, because of something he did (or, better, un/did), which has made Penelope, for reasons that have to do with blood and the law, the guardian of his memory. Penelope is the protector and executor of his life and work in the event of his death or—versions and theories abound, going from the magical to the scientific, from Einstein to Nostradamus—in the event of whatever his current diffuse and unknown and unprecedented situation is. And so, like the parenthetical directions in a play: (Enter Penelope.) What’s Penelope like? Penelope—The Young Woman assures him with the voice of an expert—was once beautif
ul. Very. “Striking,” she says. But, now, Penelope is like one of those houses that, due to neglect, has had its doors and windows left open for too many days and nights. A wide-open body, exposed to the elements and the scourge of animals that came and stayed a while and left, leaving behind an ecstatic trail of destruction because they were permitted everything. “It kind of reminds me of what happened to Jessica Lange,” The Young Woman says. And when she says this, she seems, to The Young Man, more like Audrey Hepburn than ever. And he has to lower his gaze: it hurts his eyes to look at her. But the pain passes instantly because, from outside, comes the voice of The Writer’s Mad Sister, who doesn’t talk so much as shriek to herself. And sometimes she grabs The Young Woman by the shoulders and asks her, “Are you an Hiriz or a Lina?” And roams from the house to the shore, wrapped in a kind of waterproof fisherman/scientist’s jacket, her head covered with a rubber hat and her face muzzled by one of those masks surgeons wear when entering or touching or removing a human body’s discordant organs. The Writer’s Mad Sister seems to be singing in shrieks “Here comes the bride . . . Here comes the bride . . .” The effect—presumably involuntary—she achieves is that of a kind of nurse from a gore/slasher vacation movie who’s out looking for seashells and starfish that she’ll later use to stick into the eyes of kids who are always in the wrong place at the wrong time. And The Young Man and The Young Woman discover that if there’s anything worse than delving into a writer’s life, it’s the writer’s sister standing guard over it. Because it’s not like The Writer chose his Mad Sister as the sole executor and guardian of his work and memory. The Writer never thought about posterity, about what came after the novel of his life. Nothing mattered to him less than the red tape of his ghost and memory. And it wasn’t like, he thought, many media outlets would be all that interested in invoking him and remembering him or exploring him like a freshly unearthed archeological site. The Writer wasn’t a hallowed or universal writer. The Writer was just a writer, more recognized than recognizable, and that was enough for him. And so The Writer never married or had any children because—he began to plan it when he was barely more than a child himself; it’s partly why The Young Man and The Young Woman idolize him—he chose to devote his life to literature. Almost right away—without parents and with a sister whose profile and face were fairly out of focus—The Writer discovered that being alone made everything easier. All the time in the world to read and write. Both activities designed for a lonely man—as he said in one of his many appearances on a “literary” TV program, when he was young and the producers called him because his first book sold well and “plus you say really funny things”—“who doesn’t want to leave behind a slew of widows or progeny signing memoirs full of resentment about how much they suffered in the shadow of the despot who used them in his fictions without asking their permission and blahblahblah.”