The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  * More: “People read less and less and, thus, read worse and worse. Readers are more . . . unrefined all the time. And so there are more and more readers who think that everything written in the first person singular inevitably happened to the author. Or that it’s what the author thinks. That’s why someone like Donald Barthelme spent a good part of his career not entirely discrediting the Donald Barthelme character who said, ‘Fragments are the only form I trust,’ and yet incessantly clarifying that Donald Barthelme was not that Donald Barthelme character.”

  * The Vonnegut relapse and the ambition to, one day, be able to write a Tralfamadorian book because “Their books were small things. The Tralfamadorian books were laid out in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

  * Another response to another question in another interview: “What do I like most out of everything I’ve written? Probably that first line of that story that begins like this: ‘Then it happened, the thing that, inevitably, had to happen and that, of course, should never have happened and yet . . .’ No! I take it back. Can I change my answer? Yes? What I like best is the beginning of that other story: “Dun dun dun da-DAdun da-DAdun.’”

  * “Will I ever be able to write something in which a character who is NOT a writer appears? Difficult. Doubt it. Don’t think so. I have a completely romantic notion of the figure of the writer. The kind of notion that, I suppose, others have—when they’re children—of the figure of astronauts or sports stars or firefighters, or, poor things, presidents. It was really strange: I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Even before I knew how to write. I read a survey recently regarding the age when the literary calling manifests. It concluded that 30% of writers surveyed had felt it between zero and ten, 38% between ten and twenty, 24% between twenty and thirty, 6% between thirty and forty, and 2% from forty onward. I never had a plan B, never a doubt, I was born formed and deformed. So, in my case, the thing about “be careful what you wish for because you might just get it” turns out to be true. The gift and the privilege and the condemnation of never having to renounce an initial vocation, a childhood fantasy. And, subsequently, the strange guilt of feeling that you have to, always, live up to such an exceedingly lofty wish you were granted. And to grow up—in school, in the park, with family—surrounded by people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’ll end up being while I was absolutely certain what I’d end up being, because I was already it. A kind of terrestrial-extraterrestrial. To me a writer is someone who flies off to the far reaches of the universe, fights for something, wins, and brings it back to shine a little light in the darkness, but without ever having to leave home. I always wanted to be a writer, which is why—everything seems to point to it, and I can’t say it bothers me—I’ll always want to create writers.”

  * A proposal: “How has nobody yet thought of doing a sitcom like Seinfeld or Louie but with writers? Writers are so much funnier and more pathetic than standup comedians. The fauna surrounding them: agents, editors, journalists, critics, academics, booksellers, aspiring writers . . . And the settings: festivals, award ceremonies, presentations, domestic life . . . I am sure it’d be a great success. Or, at least, it’d be very entertaining in the most terrible sense of the word, right? I propose a title: Typos . . . Ah, the things I think of, my God . . .”

  * “Do I believe in God? No. At least not in any of the models proposed by any of the great religious texts. But yes I do believe in a kind of Great Narrative Power. In a Generative Entity of Awesome Plotlines. I can’t not believe in that. I can’t not believe in the notion that there’s someone out there, working, scheming, ceaselessly thinking: let’s see what happens. I felt it again not long ago while reading a book about the turbulent origins of World War One, and the perverse way in which all the small pieces of the thing fit together. World War One, which at that time was nothing more and nothing less than The Great War; nobody could imagine there would be a sequel, just a few years later, with far-superior special effects. And yet it’s clear that yes, someone could imagine it. Someone with a lot of imagination.”

  * And, for now, the farewell: a final throwback interview with The Writer where he looks at the camera and says in a low voice: “I’m getting more tired all the time of going places where they ask me, always, where I get the ideas that I write, and never ask me how I came to the idea of being a writer. [. . .] I’m more exhausted all the time by everything that a writer supposedly has to do in order to be considered a writer. To be a judge. To be judged. To observe and be observed at one of those roundtables. [. . .] Offer opinions about a reality that, in truth, is what interests you least, or what should interest you—a creator of fictions—least. [. . .] Was it William Faulkner who said that a writer who doesn’t write tends to do morally reprehensible things? . . . I don’t know. [. . .] I like writing more all the time, I like being a writer less all the time . . .”

  All of that and much more.

  And the search engine The Young Man and The Young Woman have programmed never stops sending them new takes and sequences of The Writer. Several per day. Splinters and seeds and bricks. Files they open every morning—between expectant and hopeful, please, no more, right?—like misplaced Christmas presents. And everything arrives there. To a small portable computer with nearly infinite capacities. The Young Man and The Young Woman put all those words in the mouth of a single face, a changing face. And they’re already tired of so much watching and listening and tinkering, betting on how long it’ll be before the writer says the word “epiphany” again.

  The Young Man and The Young Woman are hungry and yet, at the same time, already a little scared that, not the witching hour, but the hour of making sandwiches is approaching. The Young Man and The Young Woman have been camping out next to the house that once belonged to The Writer and now belongs to The Writer’s Mad Sister. And it’s not a simple thing: day after day they find themselves forced to pitch and unpitch the tent according to the schedules of the powerful and not entirely predictable tides. It would’ve been easier to pitch it in the forest, but The Writer’s Mad Sister warned them that the forest is off limits, that nobody is allowed to enter the forest. The sea in front of the house—which is a sea that mixes with the mouth of a river—is decidedly bipolar. Sweet and salty, calm and temperamental. Now you see it now you don’t, and, yes, it’s easy to understand why The Writer’s favorite painting was or is Edward Hopper’s Room by the Sea. And there inside, The Young Man and The Young Woman remove slices of ham and cheese from a small portable refrigerator. And they start to construct sandwiches that are increasingly complex and baroque with ingredients bought at a convenience store. In gas station about two or three miles inland (where, to The Young Man’s despair, they can’t obtain carbonated cans of Qwerty or Plot or Nov/bel or Typë or DrINK). There and back along the road, riding a foldable designer bicycle that The Young Woman brought. Sandwiches like Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prisons, which housed the chained and perpetual prisoners of Guiseppe Arcimboldo. They’re so sick of those sandwiches—The Young Man and The Young Woman wonder if the enormous crabs that drag themselves up on the shore are edible, but can’t even work up the energy to find out—and the “moment of the sandwiches” melts into the “moment of falling asleep.” An act that’s always fascinated The Young Man because it implies, simultaneously, action and rest. Moving—falling, asleep—in order to stay immobile. And it’s a moment that, now, never fails to cause a kind of growing and excited restlessness in The Young Man. Even more because The Young Man and The Young
Woman sleep separately, each in their own sleeping bag, next to all their electronic equipment, which, fortunately, occupies less space all the time, because the future is no longer the exploration of infinite outer space, but the reduction of the space taken up on Earth. All of it designer. Even the aerodynamic tent, something of a lunar module, that wraps the two of them in a larval embrace. And that gives the whole situation an air of white wedding, outside, under the heavy breathing of the sky, as The Young Man seeks to synchronize his own respiration with that of the universe, to achieve the effect of a lullaby. The Young Woman achieves it immediately. Sleep. For The Young Man, it’s not so easy. So, The Young Man—who’d always been such a light sleeper it was like he was levitating—already knows that The Young Woman talks in her sleep and says strange things, that she repeats the verb “fall” and the place “swimming pool” over and over again. And says them with a softness that makes everything rise and lift and his dreams, his waking dreams, fly even higher as his body temperature spikes and . . .

  Let’s say it quickly so we can get it out of the way: that’s when The Young Man toys with the idea of masturbating. But he’s never been very good at masturbating. He’s not easily turned on. He needs elaborate stories. Context. Even in the early stages of puberty, half-opening copies of Playboy and Penthouse, The Young Man always preferred the black and white correspondence section to the satiny centerfolds, whose nudity always seemed too dressed up. The Young Man was much more excited by those long letters from supposed readers (but, The Young Man imagined, probably composed by editors shut inside a poorly lit windowless room) that told, with hairs and gestures and sweat and fluids, stories of pizza delivery boys seduced by horny housewives and high school teachers pursued by crazed students and cousins who haven’t seen each other for years and the omnipresent girlfriends of best friends and male bosses to be dominated and female bosses who are dominatrixes. And, yes, The Young Man could write a fan letter about The Young Woman.

  When this happens—and this kind of painful and censurable and, in the end, censored ecstasy happens every night—The Young Man starts counting sheep and makes them jump over a fence, in reverse, like a movie being played in rewind. So he tries, more or less in vain, to calm himself in the present by remembering what his world was like before meeting The Young Woman and before the figure of The Writer brought them together and stuck them inside this tent.

  Know this: The Young Man and The Young Woman come from a country where a dead or disappeared writer is quoted more often and more accurately than a living and apparent writer. It happens sometimes; it happens more all the time. A dead writer can always be exhumed and rediscovered, he’s not going to protest, and his relatives always seem ready to exchange what he was for what he might be. And The Writer—whose activities had diminished in recent times—isn’t just a dead/disappeared writer now. Really, now, The Writer is something far stranger—a lost writer. Someone whose disappearance/loss/trance has been, first, a news story of global impact and then something stranger still: a cross between a scientific aberration and atmospheric phenomenon to which many periodicals and newspapers now devote daily space and attention on par with what they devote to meteorological forecasts and horoscopes. Because The Writer has mutated into a strange kind of climatological-astrological omen. And there are more and more people who look to the sky to be guided by his sporadic appearances, much the way sailors marked their course by locating the North Star or the Southern Cross.

  The Writer has become, yes, a good story.

  So something has to be done and soon. And so the editor (whose brief participation here and his still lower moral standing make him undeserving of the capitalized The Editor) received The Young Man in his office one morning and immediately accepted his proposal because it was the kind of proposal that’s impossible to turn down: The Young Man offered to pay (The Young Man just received a small but sufficient inheritance from his grandmother) for the trip and to finance a film to be included in an anthology of some of The Writer’s unpublished work and other random pieces published in magazines and cultural supplements. The only thing The Young Man asked of the editor was a letter of introduction to The Writer’s Mad Sister (who for him was not yet The Writer’s Mad Sister). The only condition of the editor (who was the son of The Editor, of the first, only, and original editor of The Writer; The capitalized Editor who was struck down by the lightning bolt of a heart attack when he found out what had happened to The Writer in Switzerland, underground, top secret and classified) was that The Young Woman be part of the crew. And at first The Young Man resisted, but in the end he agreed: his firm opposition dissolved into blushing acceptance when The Young Woman walked into the office. The Young Woman was the editor’s niece, she worked in the office as a proofreader (and as an object of desire for more than one author who would sign off on any clause when she was the one who handed him the contract and touched his manuscript), but, above all, The Young Woman was an unconditional fan of The Writer. First, without even having read him; because The Writer was the only one who didn’t try to seduce her (and that’s why The Young Woman allowed herself, at her uncle’s request, to be photographed with him; and she even experienced the theretofore unknown anxiety of wondering and worrying whether, with the years, in the photo’s caption it would simply read “. . . with an unidentified young woman”). Second, because one day The Writer brought her a copy of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night as a gift, telling her to “read it as if it were a negative polarity self-help book—here’s everything you should not do for things to go well in your life. It’s also a kind of more or less secret formula for forgiving your parents for everything. Besides, it’s very well written.” And third, because then she read The Writer. And it’s not that she fell in love with him. But she did fall in love with the character of a woman who went in and out of his books, in different times and circumstances, in different swimming pools and cities and even planets—and that produced in her the irrepressible need to know more, to get a little closer. So she asked her editor uncle—having saved enough to cross the ocean—for a kind of safe passage to go visit The Writer’s house. Her editor uncle was happy to oblige provided that The Young Woman look through The Writer’s drawers to see what she could find. And an initial instruction: rumors of an entire novel about the story of the lost arms of Venus de Milo; of another novel with the Nazi architect Albert Speer as protagonist; of a novel titled The Beatles (like that, with the s crossed out), telling the story of a young foreigner who goes to the Abbey Road recording studios to witness firsthand the end of the greatest rock band of all time.

  The editor didn’t say anything—not to The Young Man or The Young Woman—about the more than a little flammable character of The Writer’s Mad Sister. The editor suspected that The Writer’s Mad Sister might be a lesbian. Or a nymphomaniac. Hence, The Young Man and The Young Woman as carnal decoys. The editor limited himself to introducing them and bringing them together, dictating a letter to his secretary, sending it via email, and informing them—the next day—that The Writer’s Mad Sister had agreed to their visit provided that the documentary (The Film) set aside enough time and space for her to tell “my version of the story.” The Young Man and The Young Woman accepted without giving it much thought. Besides, the editor—who at one time wanted to be a writer, but paused too long at the station of copyeditor when he married the daughter of the branch president of a popular soda company—always enjoyed manipulating people until he felt like they were his characters. And The Young Man and The Young Woman are ideal material for him, because they make him feel kind of legendary, something like Maxwell Perkins (though he has no clue who Maxwell Perkins was) protecting, more in terms of publicity than in terms of literature, the memory of an author who is his because he inherited him, while at the same time getting a kick out of watching from outside what will come of this whole experiment, this combination of interesting variables. More than once, thinks the editor, the history of great literature has been sketched out i
n smudged manuscripts that nobody would’ve hedged their bets on. And that is, for him, the precise point where publicity and publishing converge in what, for him, is and would be a miracle: to get one of those housewives who is also a single mother and a war orphan who has written a universal bestseller while waiting for her kid, who has some exotic illness, to come home from a school she can no longer afford, etcetera. The Young Man and The Young Woman—like periods and colons and ellipses—are not that exactly, but they are something. A promising or, at least, intriguing beginning.

  The Young Man has wanted to be a writer for as long as he can remember and The Young Woman wants to be something greater still: she wants to be immortalized, she wants to be the reactant that detonates the cosmic explosion of a great artist, she wants to be a muse. And there’s no better way to combine and fuse both vocations than a digital camera and a foreign assignment. That’s why others exist: so that we convince ourselves that, for a while, we can stop thinking about ourselves when really, in that moment, we’re just thinking about what others think of us.

  Now, on the other side of the tent’s fine membrane, The Young Man hears a sound that’s difficult to classify: the sound that jumps from the waves on the beach to the trees in the forest?, a poorly latched window that always dreamed of being a door? Or, maybe, The Writer’s Mad Sister roaming her domain like a joyful lost soul who has never taken pity on anyone and is already preparing the takes and testimonies that The Young Man and The Young Woman will find themselves forced to shoot and record the next morning? In fact, since their arrival a couple weeks before, The Young Man and The Young Woman have barely been able to investigate the memory of The Writer, because The Writer’s Mad Sister demands that the camera and microphone be pointed at her all the time; she, of course, feels that she’s “the true heroine of the story” and ceaselessly “reveals” her “inevitable and decisive influence” on each and every one of The Writer’s books (especially “the one where all he did was exploit my temporary in-laws, using my confidential reports and clandestine videos”), and gets lost in meandering autobiographical monologues like “My parents named me Penelope when they could’ve easily given me a female version of Ulysses. Does that exist? Because if there is something that’s characterized me throughout my life it’s perpetual motion and never sitting down to wait for anyone. Or, they could’ve named me after one of the many goddesses of war, at least they’re mythological . . . But no. It had to be Penelope—and all because of that then-popular song by a fucking Catalan singer who, I’m sure you don’t know, didn’t even write the whole fucking song, but went around, for decades, singing it as if it were his. But the music is by someone else. And every time someone asks my name and I say ‘Penelope’ they start humming that shit about the brown leather handbag and the little high-heeled shoes and the Sunday dress. And I never had any of that: not the purse, not the shoes, not even a dress for a given day of the week . . . But, well, another of the many things for which I have to thank Mommy and Daddy who, knowing them, for obvious reasons, wanted to name me Zelda. But, setting aside the demented aspect of the thing, Zelda would’ve better defined and synthesized my condition as secret-female-artist-exploited-by-famous-writer and . . . Here I am, another woman in the shadow of a man who incessantly steals the spotlight. Here, lost, in a sort of museum to my brother and that my brother built himself, yes it’s true, with my money, with my blood diamonds . . . Really, if we’re being honest, it’s not a museum or a pyramid. Nothing of the Pharaohs or the spirit of immortalizing the subject. My brother wasn’t that obvious or that banal. His was something much humbler and yet, at the same time, much more arrogant. What my brother erected here (with my financial support, let’s be honest) is a sort of personal theme park of his own past. “The palace of my memory,” he called it. This house is exactly the same, in his recollections, as the one on a beach where, when he was a boy, he spent several vacations with our parents. I wasn’t there. Or yes: I was about to be born. ‘The origin, the opening line,’ the great fool said. The exact place where everything began and where he wanted to return, and to stay, so that everything would remain . . . And all that remains here, now, is I.”