The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  His favorite Updike story, the story he was looking for now (he was almost positive that it was included in Trust Me, but Updike’s many many books occupied the two tallest shelves in his library and nothing was more out of the question for him than to climb up on a chair and spin around up there and come back down without falling) was called “The City.” And it was a shame: because that story would’ve done him a lot of good and would’ve been excellent company. “The City” narrates the story of a traveler who, arriving to an unfamiliar city, begins to feel mildly ill the moment he lands and is much worse by the time he gets to his hotel. So he decides to go to the hospital where they administer various exams and operate on his appendix and everything turns out okay—it all ends fine. But what he remembers most and best from “The City” (he’d read and admired it multiple times, he knew one line by heart: “misery itself becomes a kind of home”) was the almost touristic treatment that Updike gave to a stay in the hospital. As if the hospital were a dazzling metropolis that was, yes, quite hospitable. And he also remembered the angelic quality that Updike bestowed on the doctors and nurses. And the way that, transfigured and much improved, as if riding an epiphany, the traveler abandoned the city that he only sensed from inside that other city, happy and grateful. But, as he said, as he thought: he didn’t dare climb up there to get it, because he had to go down to that other city.

  So he grabbed the book that was closest at hand and, of course (they’re spread out around the house like mousetraps or candles), it was one of his various copies of Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

  The Lonely Man put it in one of his jacket pockets along with that small notebook that he takes with him everywhere and in which, for a while now, he’s been writing random phrases that, when he rereads them, always refuse to come together, to make any sense or justify their existence. Phrases that, now, suddenly, while he waits to move from the first to the second stage of his wait, arrange themselves, after so much time, in germs and bacilli and spores of possible stories—invented parts floating in the air, waiting for him to inhale them and then, inspired, exhale them.

  In “Emergencies” a man ponders which book to take with him to a hospital from which he doesn’t know when he’ll get out, if he’ll get out / Start by telling how he got there / Include funicular.

  Some time ago, The Lonely Man and his library had moved to the not so high heights of the city of B (just four hundred meters above the level of a nearby sea with neither waves nor suicides, whose shores people visited just to eat and drink) because he was tired of the big city and the smallness of the increasingly rigid and wrinkled and Prêt-à-Porter literary world of that city.

  Now, nothing was what it once was; and the repetition of a classic but tired slogan insisting that this was the best place in the universe when it came to “welcoming foreign writers” no longer swayed him—because he’d never believed in it. He’d come there, not tempted by glossy brochures promoting “the life of the writer,” but because it was far away from where he was from and born and where he’d already had all “the life of the writer” he was prepared to put up with in his lifetime.

  Now, moving, leaving behind and far below the “heart of the publishing world” of his language, was like being alone and in good company. He’d found a modernist loft in the heights, on the edge of a forest, accessed via a funicular that went up and down along a set of rails every couple minutes. A short time and distance of physical travel, yes, but enough to feel that you were ascending to the heavens or descending to the infernos, knowing that you’d return to paradise later or, at least, to a limbo where (his case) writers ended up who were finding it harder and harder to write and easier and easier to say “I’m writing” and change the subject like someone, funicularily, changing direction. Never getting off at the middle station, the halfway point, with the cyclists and runners and the suddenly unemployed victims of economic crisis, who’d decided to believe in that whole “sound of mind and sound of body” thing—because you have to believe in something.

  About an hour ago—going down in every sense—The Lonely Man was gripping one of the handles hanging from the ceiling of the funicular, trying to think of anything else. Sitting was more uncomfortable than standing, because it compressed his out-of-tune organs.

  The Lonely Man had descended to the lights of the city in the darkness of the early morning (the funicular began its service at 5:30 a.m.) and, ah, it’s so hard to turn off an unsound mind inside the unsound body of a writer. There again (in that place where, mornings and afternoons, children coming and going from school went around howling: “Funi! Funi!” as if unwrapping the greatest of presents, a present so big it didn’t fit inside their houses) The Lonely Man repeated to himself again, clenching his teeth and with tears in his eyes, the way children cry, that it was the funicular that made him make the decision, in record time, to move there. The Lonely Man—increasingly reluctant to move, having lived through a childhood of multiple displacements, courtesy of his parents’ emotional earthquakes—had signed the contract the same day he viewed the loft and devoted a good part of what was left of the workday, almost in ecstasy, to riding the funicular up and down, playing with the funi, like a kid. Up and down and repeating over and over the almost mystical moment when—just as the collision of the descending cabin and the ascending cabin seemed inevitable, in mid-trajectory, the single rail forked. And—like ships in the night—they passed each other. And the passengers looked from one car to the other. Some coming and some going, riding a ghost river while on the shores grew the successive courtyards of a school playground where boys and girls were separated according to age and knowledge or lack thereof. And, depending on which way he was going, up or down, those children appeared to grow or to shrink. And they watched him pass by with little interest. A few, the small ones, shouted and waved. And he waved back at them and then, of course, immediately understood that they weren’t waving at him or the other travelers. The kids were waving, always, at the funicular, at the funi, at the journey itself.

  And The Lonely Man asked himself then (as he doesn’t dare ask himself now, because why add mental pain to his physical pain) if all his funiculary enthusiasm might not be a mechanical manifestation of the son he never had or found or, even worse, of the son who was almost his, who was lost. Or an exotic hybrid, half reflex of something that never existed and half sensation of a limb that’s been amputated, but that’s still felt, there, trying to catch the ball without a hand or to kick it without a foot.

  But, again, the whole subject was too fraught for him. So—writer’s prerogative, one of the few “gifts” writers enjoy in relation to other mortals—he immediately sought new alternate applications and, in the funicular, he thought “Hitchcock!” and he thought “Harry Lime!” A decidedly noir feel. The funicular as an ideal space for those vertiginous or abyssal persecutions suffered by James Stewart or Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock films. Or the funicular as a perfect place for one of those menacing and revealing conversations like the one that Orson Wells and Joseph Cotton have at the top of a Viennese Ferris wheel in The Third Man. Later, soon thereafter, The Lonely Man became preoccupied with learning everything he could about the funicular (a word which comes from the Latin funiculus, or “cord”) and took notes that, as always, he thought would be good for something, but that almost never fit anywhere. Attention: the first funicular in the world was unveiled in Lyon in 1862 and it connected Rue Terme with Croix-Rousse. Then came the one in Budapest (1870), the one in Vienna (1873), the one in Istanbul (1875), the one in the United Kingdom (1876), the one in Valparaíso (1883), the one in Switzerland (1888), the one in Lima (1896), the one in Bilbao (1915), the one in Santiago de Chile (1925), and, last of all, the one in B (1906). Specs: line of longitude 736 meters, altitude of the lower station 196 meters, altitude of the upper station 359 meters, slope 158 meters, maximum gradient 28.9 percent, 2 vehicles, vehicle capacity 50 people and a maximum of two bicycles, transportation capacity (one way)
2.000 people per hour, speed 18 km/h, cable diameter 30 mm, width of the track 1.000 mm (metric). The Lonely Man had studied all of that the way other people memorize psalms from the Bible or verses from the Koran. And earlier, arriving to the platform where he’d catch a suburban train bound for the emergency room, he repeated it to himself like a prisoner of war surrendering minimal but vital intelligence for his survival, invoking the Geneva Convention or whatever, but, please, don’t kill him, he doesn’t want to die here, alone, waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the approaching train.

  This time the descent in the funicular (which had always seemed to him a sort of domestic and playful epic, a free and fluid associator of more or less conscious ideas) felt saturated with ominous and prophetic and Dantean and Odyssean elements. As if the Gods were ceaselessly sending him signs that something important was happening and, everybody knows, the gods, though cryptic and often ambiguous and quite contradictory in their manifestations and messages, don’t tend to be subtle or elegant. The gods like it to be known that they’re there, all the time, changing humors—watchers with raised eyebrows. And, every so often, unleashing pollutions and knee-jerk reactions, sending telegrams almost always bearing bad news, stops in every sense of the word and expression, what are known as “divine omens.” Which amount to “Everybody get down and take cover and find shelter.” So, he didn’t go down stairs to protect himself from thunder and lightning, but let himself be borne aloft, hanging from a steel cable, inside a small metal and plastic cabin, alone and clutching himself so that the pain tap-dancing inside his chest, ignoring the increasingly irregular rhythm of his heart, didn’t burst out like an alien and start doing pirouettes.

  And, yes, as mentioned, disturbing appearances, ominous signs. Waiting for the funicular to reach its final and highest stop—his—he saw a young girl, another early passenger, pause at the top of the stairway to contemplate the screen of her mobile phone. And, clearly, it wasn’t the best place to do such a thing. But he’d already gotten used to successive sightings of people who (surrendering to compulsive updating of social media profiles and brief messages) seemed to lose all physical and practical awareness of their surroundings. Like this girl, ignorant of the fact that she has stopped right in the middle of the path, in the worst possible place, taking the risk that anybody running down to catch the funicular would come around the corner of the stairway without looking and run right into her and send her flying through the air. And he hadn’t finished thinking it and, already inside the cabin, barely managed to lift his arm and try to warn her in an anguished voice when, of course, someone came running down and hit her and the girl was sent flying, a smile still on her face, no doubt provoked by something she read on her phone before crashing into the ground. And no: no screaming or crying. She just stood up, moving like a zombie, her face mangled and covered in blood, her mouth open in a circle missing multiple teeth, repeating over and over, as if in a trance, the monotone of a broken question: “Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?” Every part of her broken and yet still not realizing that nothing has higher definition than that reality that she insists on viewing only via a screen, that reality that sooner or later—if you’re distracted looking at it, shrunken, on a small rectangle of plastic and chips and optic fibers—crashes into you. The doors to the funicular closed and he, moving away, down the mountain, watched her fade in the distance, in the morning mist, trying to find her mobile phone, while the man who ran into her looked at her not knowing what to do and then took out his own phone to find the answer.

  Once The Lonely Man got down to the bottom, out of the cabin and leaning against the wall on the platform, waiting for the suburban train to arrive that’d drop him a few streets away from the Emergency Room, he watched as a giant albino with Down Syndrome came toward him. The man, whose age was hard to pinpoint (he seemed to be the timeless age of those legendary creatures that always appear moving and diffuse in photographs), started to shout something in his unique language and, luckily, the train arrived and he got on and he thought, almost there. Almost who knows where, to whatever comes after whatever they do to him. To—as those lucky souls who learned to believe the way he learned the alphabet say—the will of God.

  And, suddenly, in pain, The Lonely Man remembered that chapter from Tender Is the Night that took place in a Swiss funicular. On the train, he looked for and found the page and there were Dick Diver and Nicole Warren (not yet married, all of it occurring in the novel’s lengthy central flashback), in Glion. And it said there that funiculars “are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn’t want to be recognized.” And, like so many other times, he thought “Ah, Fitzgerald!” And thinking it and savoring it made him feel a little better and he even rummaged around in his pocket to find a pen and the notebook he took with him everywhere, so he could write it down: “F. S. F. / Funicular / Hat / Stranger / Girl / Telephone / Giant / Etcetera.”

  In “Frankenstein,” a man who has accompanied his father (who has already passed through certain doors where the man can’t follow) to the hospital observes the arrival of a giant albino with some kind of mental handicap, carrying in his arms a pretty young girl with a mangled face who repeats: “Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?” The man stands up and gives her his phone and the girl seems to calm down and the giant smiles at him and then a doctor calls the man and tells him that his father has had a heart attack, that it was sudden and fatal, that there was nothing he could do. There wasn’t even a chance or need to put into action the resurrection by defibrillator that, when he saw it on TV, the man always found too far-fetched in its efficiency, like the long and drawn out sex acts in porn movies. The man looks for his phone to notify his mother (she and his father separated years ago) and discovers that he no longer has it, that it was stolen or he lost it or, he remembers suddenly, the girl has taken it, clutching it like a consoling stuffed animal. He looks for a pay phone. But there aren’t any pay phones anymore. All telephonic activity has been privatized, individualized. Anyway, he realizes, he doesn’t know his mother’s phone number by heart. It’s not necessary to dial phone numbers anymore and, so, it makes no sense to memorize them, like with so many other things that can be accessed by pressing a button. The doctor asks him if he wants to see his father and takes him to a room where the body lies and there inside, also, unexpectedly, are the girl and the giant and his phone and . . .

  The Lonely Man has been waiting for about ten minutes, but it feels like it’s been ten hours of a ten-year wait.

  In hospitals—now and forever—time expands.

  In hospitals, just by going inside, one is already patient.

  In both senses of the word. There, one arms oneself with patience in order to be disarmed as a patient.

  The Lonely Man watches the nurse who, about eleven minutes ago now, took down his information. The woman asked him synthetically what his symptoms were (and he pointed at his chest and said: “It hurts. A lot”) and gave him a plastic bracelet with his name and a barcode printed on it (which he carefully fastened, next to his watch). The woman who, now, a few meters away but so many years later has already, for The Lonely Man, taken on the sepia hue of things distant in time yet not in space. The place is the same, he knows. The place hasn’t changed in any way and it’ll always and forever be the same. And, cornered, The Lonely Man will have to stay in there for who knows how long. Ice ages will come, meteorites will crash near the hospital wiping out species in a single blow, and he’ll still be there, waiting to hear his name called, like the magic word that breaks the spell of immobility and makes events precipitate, and with the events, he precipitates too. Plunging over the precipice of those swinging doors—to the disconsolate next stage—through which every so often an occupied or empty stretcher enters or exits, allowing a glimpse of the terrifying mysteries of the other side. Then he hears it. His name. Again. His last name—making it through schools and universities—al
ways sounds odd when he hears it in the mouth of another person and especially in the mouth of a stranger. And they take him to a small office with no doors, almost a niche, and he enters and has the sensation that he’s entering successively smaller rooms, like Chinese boxes or Russian nesting dolls, until he reaches the irreducible center of his malady. The next one, he shudders, will be a coffin. And not a bracelet around his wrist, but a tag on his toe. His name there again, written for the first and last time by the hand of a stranger. Maybe some orthographical error.

  The ideal, thinks The Lonely Man, would be, when you go to hospitals, for them to give you an alias—a hospital name. And, if possible, for patients to be allowed to pick their own. That they be granted that symbolic privilege, the way a kid is given a consoling candy after being lied to with a “It won’t hurt at all.” Yes: the opportunity to be other, to have all the more or less bad things happen to someone else while you’re in there, and only get your true name back when you get out, with the good news that you get to leave, that you don’t have to stay there, inside.