The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Thinking about what The Writer’s Mad Sister says helps The Young Man close his eyes at last. Wanting to fall asleep, again, trying to achieve (that verb “achieve,” applied to reaching the peak of an activity where the less you think the better you do, always seemed out of place to The Young Man) sleep. But it’s not easy. The Young Man heard once that human beings, having come from water, think better near water. He can’t confirm it, but one thing is clear to him: he thinks more near the water, as if the water were an excellent conductor of cerebral electricity. Now, electrocuted, trying to convince insomnia to give him one night’s rest, The Young Man can’t help but think that the whole thing with the documentary (The Film) won’t be more than another dead-end alleyway, worse, a circular corridor. The documentary—The Film to which he’d attributed the psychochemical properties of a detonator, the magic words to make or break the spell—as yet another reason to suspect that, maybe, his gunpowder has always been and will always be wet. The Young Man, it’s been said before, wants to be a writer more than anything. Even more than he wants The Young Woman; something he could, no doubt, succeed at more quickly and easily than he could with a novel or a book. A masterpiece that would erase the barriers The Young Woman has built up and transform her into one of those blushing damsels in a salon lit by complicated candelabras. But no. Not yet. And it’ll be a while, a long while, it seems. Because, of course, The Young Man does write. But The Young Man isn’t a writer, because (as much as he tried to convince himself to the contrary with a multitude of arguments, despite what happened during that brief aerial episode with The Writer, which he doesn’t dare confess and remembers more and more as an unconfessable and unforgivable sin whose punishment has been written like an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not write”) he knows that he’s not a true writer until he’s been published and passes through bookstores to see how his book has been displayed and, when the employees aren’t looking, moves it to the most well-positioned tables. Things like that. Having something behind him and everything in front of him, knowing that he’ll never get anywhere. But, at least, he’ll be on the way, moving. Now, The Young Man inhabits that terrible moment in the life of any writer, any prewriter. A zone without limits where everything seems worthy of being told, everything could end up making a good story, every horse looks at you with those bet-on-me eyes. But it’s all a dreamer’s dream. A desert of deceptive fertility where nothing germinates. Just titles, first sentences, endings, dedications, epigraphs (of which, like in The Writer’s books, there will be, for many people, too many), acknowledgements (which, like in The Writer’s books will be, for most people, too many; but The Young Man has been reconsidering their inclusion ever since The Young Woman told him that, “I don’t believe them, they’re false, they’re acknowliedgements”), and speeches, and even cover designs for editions with various publishers and in various languages. On particularly feverish days, The Young Man goes so far as to imagine the reviews of his books and a blurb for the back cover from a writer he admires. All of it meticulously compiled in small print in the increasingly numerous notebooks (Moleskine, of course) that he carries with him everywhere. Notebooks that—when he opens and rereads them—produce in him the frustrating unease of someone trying to recall dreams and make some sense of them. All meaning seems to escape him like sand, like water, like air, but then, to keep from having a breakdown, he tells himself it doesn’t matter: everything those notebooks contain—he consoles himself, he justifies himself—will look really nice on the far side of the years, in the first displays of the great exposition of his life. And The Young Man likes to believe that this stage—this centrifugal rite of passage of empty suits that never fit right when he tries them on—is an inevitable transition, a kind of hormonal disorder that drives the body and face and voice and mood and personality mad. An electric dance—a flash of lightning like in animated drawings—that’ll drift into a more or less challenging and harmonious choreography. Something temporary—a fever that attacks all writers when they’re young—never suspecting that this is an affliction that’ll never quit, that’ll always be there, poking its head out every so often throughout the years, disguised as writer’s block, as why sit in here when you could go walk around outside. But The Young Man doesn’t think about the future because the future hurts—each day that passes is another day that he hasn’t finished a book he hasn’t even started yet. And The Young Man has tried everything to finish starting something. From particularly lyrical and inefficient therapies like copying out a beloved writer’s text letter for letter to feel those words spill from his fingers, to running out into an open field on a stormy day wearing a metal helmet on his head, praying to be struck by a bolt of lightning. A celestial finger of light, an energy whose effect will translate into him getting back to his feet transformed into a Balzac Machine (who would even fabricate and select the type of paper and typography of his books) or a Dickens Machine (who would self-publish and chase pirates between book tours where he’d give performances “acting” out parts of his novels) or, if nothing else, into a more intermittent Stendhal Machine who, it’s true, left many things unfinished or just begun, but who also wrote The Charterhouse of Parma (supposedly unfinished as well, sure) in just a few weeks. And this last one is such a childish fantasy: imagining and hoping that, once activated, he’d no longer experience the boundless horror vacui of paralysis when—though the books and years pass by—he’ll always go back there. To The Ground Zero. To the pistol shot inaugurating a never-ending race. To charging out of the trenches firing in every direction, hoping to hit the target of the blank white page or the black computer screen. In his lowest and darkest hours, The Young Man wonders—adoptive child of an adaptable time—if he wants to be a writer more than he wants to write.

  Of course, The Young Man attended various writing workshops—like someone crawling on their knees to Lourdes—of different flavors and styles. He can count them, in the impenetrable darkness of the tent, on the fingers of one hand.

  Thumb: the one with the guy who, in the living room of his apartment, had a punching bag with a photograph of Hemingway on it that he punched and punched, while sweating and talking constantly, but between pants about courage and grace under pressure and recalling that one time he’d charged at the bulls in Pamplona, because the bulls never charged him.

  Index: the one with the guy who had a small bust of Shakespeare on his desk that he turned to with the wink of an eye and a “Will,” and who explained to them “the methodology for constructing plotlines out of chess moves.”

  Middle: the one with the guy who made them stroke quartz crystals “until the idea comes.”

  Ring: the one with the guy who considered it essential that first they read (buying them directly from him, “to avoid falling in the trap of publishers and the market”) all his books in order to “comprehend the mystery of literature.”

  Pinky: the one with the guy who insisted “that everything begins and ends with Chekov.” Which caused The Young Man a lot of anxiety: because The Young Man read Chekov, enjoyed Chekov, but never understood what his genius was. And he understood even less all the people who wanted to write like that. Those endings that were so open, where nothing was resolved and where all you seem to hear was the voice of the wind slipping in and running around. Endings where, for example, a man and a woman meet beside a museum stairway, with the whole sky above their heads, just to say goodbye to each other. And that’s about it. A prologue and a selection of Chekov stories put together by Richard Ford gave him a secret hope. There, the American started by saying pretty much the same thing The Young Man thought: Chekov wasn’t interesting. But, then, Ford admitted his error and joined the Russian’s fanatical and fiery followers. Even worse, Ford turned into the worst kind of fan—the converted fan. The Young Man had read a Spanish translation someone had recommended, two English translations, one into the French (with the help of a dictionary), and even a Russian original which he’d limited himself to staring at, as if those
Cyrillic letters were, yes, quartz crystals. But The Young Man only managed to see, as if through one of those windows with emerald-green glass, simple people having simple (ah, the word) epiphanies that are, generally, tepid and tenuous and almost ungraspable, like the smoke of the flame bidding farewell to the candle. One night, in the middle of a workshop, after one too many drinks, The Young Man dared to say (repeating something The Writer once said) that any one of Chekov’s disciples seemed to him superior to the master. Everyone laughed at him. He walked out and never went back. And Ishmael Tantor walked out with him. His literary best friend—or something like that. They met in that workshop. Ishmael Tantor was massive, weighing more than three hundred fifty pounds (“You see: in my name, the whale communes with the pachyderm; very appropriate”); he was the son of a renowned lawyer, in his final year of law school, already considered a kind of prodigy in the subject; he insisted that he’d signed up for the workshop “to meet girls,” and admitted without shame that he’d read very little. “You don’t have to read so much,” he said. “All that reading just confuses you and steals time from writing. And you don’t have to write so much either.” Ishmael Tantor—“for obvious reasons”—claimed that he’d only read, albeit multiple times, Moby-Dick. “You don’t need anything else. That’s where everything came from and where it’ll all return.” Ishmael Tantor had never offered to read anything during the workshop sessions. Until one night when he was the only one left who hadn’t “presented,” and he pulled out a stack of wrinkled pages from the inside pocket of a Canadian lumberjack jacket that he never took off, even in the summer, and announced, “I’m going to read a little thing I wrote in the bar on the corner, before coming . . .” He cleared his throat like a trumpet and then . . .

  There was a sixth master workshopper—like one of those sixth fingers that some people are born with that’s removed as soon as possible—whom The Young Man considered the best of all. A sad man who’d published a single novel—considered at the time precocious proof of genius yet to come—at a very young age, and who only seemed happy when talking about the other peoples’ books. Someone who just had them read and made them think about what they were reading and who, at the end of one session, told them that he was very sick and that he wouldn’t be able to host the workshops anymore, sending them off with a “I wish you all the best in the world.” A short time later, in the pages of a cultural supplement, where suddenly everyone seemed to be commemorating him simultaneously, The Young Man discovered that the writer had died. Before long, The Young Man thought, he’d be claimed by the writers The Young Man liked to refer to as “The Resurrectionists”: always young and ready thieves of literary bodies, dividing up the dead in order to resurrect them in their own image and dimension, deforming them into something they’d never been and something they were unable to deny or resist. Like that, until the absent writer ended up functioning as a kind of antecedent to those present individuals who adore him for precisely that reason—because he gave them a reason to be. Living writers who only seem to like dead writers whose work, they feel, resembles their own. So, they read them just long enough to convince themselves of that resemblance. And The Resurrectionists went around, facing off under standards of ghosts (my dead writer is more alive than yours), writing in the mode of this or that dead writer, acting as official mediums and channelers of an increasingly capricious memory, and elaborating curious cosmogonies where there seemed to be no place for different or international writers. Because everyone and everything seemed to emerge only and exclusively through the window of that bottomless black hole that devoured all light, ceaselessly digging with the fanatic dedication of Snow White’s dwarves. Pick and shovel. Heigh-ho sounding a lot like Sieg Heil. But not even then. To The Young Man’s surprise—maybe because he wasn’t sufficiently experimental, though not exactly traditional either—nobody robbed the sad writer’s tomb. And, yes, The Young Man—desperate—fantasized about exhuming him and bringing him to his house and sitting him down in the basement rocking chair and killing in his name. Or proposing articles on his work to journals and magazines. Or dedicating a blog to him. But The Young Man was a noble fellow or, at least, possessed high indexes of guilt and shame in his literary DNA.

  And it follows that, to overcome such a temptation, The Young Man had opted for a secret storyline. Inventing, inside his head, an entire literary system to which—every night, like tonight, when he was unable to fall asleep, to let sleep take him, a couple more verbal variations, along with “achieving” sleep, of what the act of sleep does—he added details and stories, with the same devotion and love others gave to assembling gigantic electric train sets. An entire unconfessable universe—an entire literature, with its lives and works and deaths and breakdowns—where he, like the final piece of a puzzle, would travel alone and only arrive at the end. On the seventh day of his creation. Not to rest, but, then, to be ready to write and to begin and to finish and to publish. A universe that—set to the rhythm of ancient cabalistic dances—grew out of inertia and ended up containing him so that, initiated and included, the inverse movement could take place—absolute contraction after so much expansion. And that, in the end, leaves him alone and divine and all-powerful and ready to give birth to a Great Work. And there are times The Young Man thinks he’s on the right track. And other times he feels he’s going off the rails into an abyss with only himself at the bottom. He’s read of madness like this; and has even admired novels that tell the story of a man who ends up going to live inside his own head, in an imagined city that will end up swept away by the whisper of fire and the voice of the wind. But The Young Man tells himself—he wants to convince himself—that it’s worth the risks, the necessary hazards of any great enterprise.

  So now, in the tent, The Young Man opens his notebook again and with the help of a small flashlight reviews and revisits his kingdom, the only place he feels himself a creator and creative. Outside, again, that sound that, now, could only be that of a lost boy. The cry of a child prodigy. A staccato of tears and moans, intermittent, but precisely and rhythmically intermittent—like a wail that’s communicated in Morse code. The message of someone who is sinking into the waters of his sadness. The sound frightens The Young Man a little. So, better to distract himself, to think of other things. The Young Man reads and takes notes and watches The Young Woman sleep. And there is a certain comfort in watching her with his eyes wide open while her eyes are tightly shut. Like that—there but elsewhere, so near in her remoteness, between dreams—The Young Woman seems less aware of her beauty. Because he’s no fool, he knows, knows in the same way he knows that there’s no life after death and that sooner or later bad people get what’s coming to them: The Young Woman spends her life constantly thinking—at least in a tiny but important part of her brain—about how beautiful she is. Some women are like that: they know they’re beautiful, though in an unconscious way, all the time, that’s how they’re programmed. When she’s asleep, it’s like that part of her is deactivated and The Young Woman transforms into, merely, a beautiful girl who doesn’t know that she’s beautiful, because, maybe, she’s dreaming that she’s inside a burning building, or flying, or naked in public, without that making her think that her nakedness is beautiful. When she’s asleep—her lips half-open and letting escape a whistle that sounds like the wind in a black and white horror movie—The Young Man can concentrate on the only thing about The Young Woman that might be considered, by dull and inferior beings, an imperfection. The Young Woman has a birthmark at the base of her neck that, in the beginning, The Young Man said to himself, had the shape of a country. He drew it from memory, searched for it on an atlas, and he found no nation with borders to match it. The Young Man went further. He considered provinces, states, communities, districts. Not there either. So, he decided, the shape of that mark must correspond to the shape of a city. An even more difficult mission; but The Young Man had already spent several months marking maps, and something told him that the city might be in Central Eu
rope. Buildings with stone giants holding up balconies and imperial eagles alighting, motionless amid rooftop winds and walls with bullet holes and sad trees and windows with dirty glass that seem always recently rained on and “Sooner or later I’ll find it. And when I do, like someone breaking a curse and casting a spell, that’ll be the city where we’ll live together,” The Young Man says to himself. Meanwhile and in the meantime, that city, more imagined than imaginary, is where all his literature transpires. His cosmogony. At times, of course, the whole thing rebels and is revealed to have a “texture” quite similar to that of Playboy and Penthouse letters. Dispatches to himself that are seriously masturbatory, yes, for sure; but then The Young Man wants to believe—and subsequently believes—that his is an epic form of masturbation. The mother of all masturbations. Masturbations like those of ancient gods, spilling their semen and breast milk across the dome of the skies and giving birth to galaxies and nebulas with names of their own and myths for everyone. A brilliance that The Young Man manipulates and scribbles down and crosses out as if he were dealing with delicate physics and chemistry formulas, orchestrating and disordering highly volatile elements. Blocked in his writing, The Young Man writes writers. A cast of proper nouns that he makes strange and sets in motion, marching them from here to there—like the lead soldiers of his childhood—pitting them against each other in eternal battles. Duels without the first blood of sharp knife-fighters. Intrigues in ruined palaces. Men and women. Young and old.