The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  For many people, the most frightening word was “cancer”; “cancer” being, these days, a jack-of-all-trades, the concentration of everything that implied a one-way trip to a place no one ever dreamed of visiting, but that, every so often, reared its head and brandished its pincers around the borders of a nightmare. The word that frightened The Lonely Man most, on the other hand, started with an A. Actually, it was one of the two words that frightened him most. The words—both of them—that frightened him most began with A and with a. The first one was the surname of a German psychiatrist from the beginning of the twentieth century, which was tattooed across the shoulder of a disease that was new but whose symptoms had been present since the beginning of time: “Alzheimer.” The second (he’d learned it during a fairly lengthy stay in Mexico, where he’d gone with the assignment of writing a book about Mexico City for a series about different cities at the turn of the millennium) was “ahorita”: that deceptive diminutive of ahora—meaning “now” in Spanish—was nothing but the indescribable translation into a handful of letters (you had to experience it in the flesh and endure it with your own patience to know what it was was like) of the exceedingly particular and elastic and always postponable way that Mexicans related to every kind of commitment, promise of punctuality, and spatiotemporal responsibility to other people. “Ahorita” like the certified suspicion and preliminary maneuver of what would result in, many hours or millennia later, a Mexican asking you, with a smile hot enough to raise blisters, “What’s happening?” or “What’s up?” Really asking, “What didn’t happen / isn’t happening / won’t happen” or “What wasn’t/isn’t/won’t be up?” In Mexico—he knew it then and won’t ever forget it—saying “ahorita” was a way to honor, subliminally, ancient deities with long names made up of pure consonants: scaled and feathered beings that spun around circular calendars, biting their own tails, spreading their wings, without hurry, because to hurry, to arrive on time, to finish what you started, was for mere mortals who didn’t believe in the wide and always expansive reward of the future. Waiting and waiting and waiting like in the beginning of Casablanca, but in the D. F., where that other movie would be called Apocalypse Ahorita and Willard would eternally delay his departure from his hotel in Saigon to go and look for Kurtz with an “I’m going ahorita.” So, “después” or “later” was an indeterminate future and “luego-luego” or “in a bit” meant, he supposed, right away, but “in a bit.” In Mexico City, he remembers, he had several nervous breakdowns waiting for people who never came, next to telephones that never rang. He was still waiting for them to ring, to come. The Lonely Man spent a couple weeks there without much or too much happening. He wrote down random things in a notebook like: “Mex-Machismo: ‘Qué padre’ (exclamation of praise, using the word padre or “father” with a positive connotation); ‘Me vale madre’ (a derogation amounting to ‘It’s worthless,’ using the word madre or “mother” with a negative connotation); ‘Mi Rey’ (meaning ‘My King,’ which women say to men to keep them docile and not even bothering to realize they might in fact be kings, yes; but it’s the women who are the Supreme Empresses of the Galaxy).” He walked through vertiginous slums, breathed nearly-solid air, dodged bullets blessed by the Virgin of Guadalupe, was deafened by golden trumpets, interviewed masked monosyllabic wrestlers, bit into too many mescal worms, and committed the most terrible and damning of errors: drunk and electrified by those volts that make you want to keep drinking, in Plaza Garibaldi, he took, in one shot, a photo wearing a cowboy hat (recalling the sad and sordid and crepuscular photos of John Cheever and Francis Scott Fitzgerald with Mexican sombreros), which is like invoking the heavenly furies and the evil fates. But he didn’t come up with anything to write while he was there, because he saw so many things, so many possibilities, that they ended up withering away and destroying each other in a colorful war. One night, flipping through channels where everyone was keeling over with laughter on the TV in his hotel, he remembered the messages Penelope sent him via email, a while back, from a nearby republic, prisoner of her more tyrannical than democratic in-laws. And suddenly—reusing that material that his sister had filmed and put in writing—everything seemed to fall into place. And the book wrote itself, as if it were being dictated to him in screams. But all of that was like something that happened in another life. He took no comfort in remembering himself as clever and powerful—just the opposite. The only effect produced by that past was to increase the potency of his present and the enigma of his immediate future. The possibility that the doctor to whom he was now returning—time to find out already—would enter the office and, flipping through the various papers and graphs of his diagnosis, say to him: “Ahorita, Alzheimer’s.”

  But no. Not yet. Not quite yet. Put off the inevitable until the last second. Like when he was a kid and finally got around to studying on the dreadful Sunday night that preceded the exterminating Monday morning. Like when, as an adolescent, he was expelled from school and waited more than a year to tell his parents and every morning pretended to go to school when he really went to read in the library instead. Like when he was not a kid or an adolescent anymore, but put off submitting his manuscript to his editor until the last second, almost en route to the printer, adding long paragraphs in the final round of proofs.

  In the same way, the same pathology, the imminence of the diagnosis is translated into a torrent of ideas that he writes down in his notebook, in a delirious fever out of which bursts the possibly last but revealing words of a dying man. In storylines closer to something—a kind of oriental and exotic writing—he read about once called “biji” than to the western and exceedingly played-out short story. Contained yet open plot capsules that, for once, more closely resemble Chekov and Munro than his typical hurricaning stories, blowing from all directions at once, as if everyone in them were talking at the same time and not raising their hand to ask permission first.

  In “Loss,” a father battles the death of his son. And, of course, he loses. Now that father—suddenly an ex-father—knows how to respond when people ask him what’s the worst thing that’s happened to you in your life. Now, in addition, he knows how to respond when people ask what’s the worst thing that will happen to you in your life—because it already happened. There’s nothing more horrible than having all the answers, there’s nothing worse than knowing nobody has the answer to his question and that that question is “why?” It’s not fair to have to live through the death of a child. His son won’t see him grow old and he won’t see the beginning of his son’s old age. Suddenly, everything is going against the natural order of things. The natural order that determines that, when a father dies, his son—beyond the pain he might end up feeling—also feels somewhat liberated, knowing that his father is no longer thinking of him. On the other hand, when the son is the one dying, the fact that he no longer thinks of him is, for the father, a biblical punishment, a private plague. And his son has died even before his grandparents, the father’s own parents, whom, presumably, he will also see die. And nobody will see his death. Nobody, yes, will live to tell it. Nobody will survive to tell him about it. Now, that man is outside all logic of time and space, the normal course of the story has been altered. So, he decides, anything is possible, anything can happen. Because the worst thing that can happen to someone has already happened to him. Which means that now nothing can happen to him but the expansive wave of what keeps on happening, what expands, what occupies more space all the time inside and outside of him and what will soon contain and devour everything, down to the last beam of light, until everything is void and black and hole. Last rites cited, the first displays of affection from acquaintances, and that’s it, the father decides that the only way he’ll be able to overcome the pain will be to eliminate all traces of his son. Delete. Erase him as if he’d never existed to the point where he’d even forget that he’d erased him. Wipe from his memory the shared palace of his son’s memory. So, first, the father burns all his drawings, gives away the tiny clothes, put
s toys in bags and takes them to hospitals and orphanages, calls a charity organization to have them come take away his son’s rocket-shaped bed. But soon he discovers that it’s not working, that it’s not enough: the pain is still there, he can’t forget him, his son is more present than ever in the increasingly full void he’s left behind. The next step, it’s clear, is to end things with his wife, with the mother—because it all began with her, it was her he entered so his son would come out. He cuts her into pieces, buries her in the garden; but the relief doesn’t last long. Just passing in front of his son’s school; or approaching that cinema where they went to see Toy Story, all three of them, for the first of many times; or the place where they ate their favorite hamburgers; or . . . What follows is a hurricane of death and destruction transmitted live and direct from helicopter-mounted cameras. Flames, explosions, screams. Neither the police nor the army are able to stop him; and the father feels he’s the chosen one, invulnerable, an unstoppable force of nature, a Shiva dancing her last dance. At sunrise, almost nothing remains of the small city and our hero—a man on a mission—departs for the rest of the planet; because his son loved geography and knew so much about other countries and told him that, when he grew up, he wanted to be “the person who chooses the colors of the countries on maps.”

  In “Lost,” a father, unhappy in his marriage and his job, takes his only pleasure in his son. His worst fear, his constant terror, is that something will happen to the little boy and that he won’t be able to do anything to stop it. So he barely sleeps at night, weaving waking nightmares and counting hydrophobic sheep and composing possible variations for the dispassionate aria of disgrace that—it seems inevitable, like an incurable advanced disease or a drunk driver who runs a stoplight or a little finger inserted into an electrical socket—he’ll someday have to hear. One Saturday afternoon, walking around a shopping center with his son, he decides that he can no longer tolerate the uncertainty of living, in agony, always ready to anticipate an impossible to anticipate blow. So he decides, then and there, to be the one who takes the initiative and, in a way, win the battle. The man walks with his little boy through the halls of the shopping center and, suddenly, without saying anything, drops his hand, lets him go, on his own, swept away by the multitude, escalators up or down, as if ascending to hell or descending to heaven. He loses him so that, at last, he can find himself. The pain—surprise—lasts as long as it takes him to make it to the parking lot, get in his car, and leave without looking back. Now, thinks the man, I am other, I am different, I am new. And, yes—he’s a monster. Days later, the whole world learns of the first “deeds” and “exploits” of someone who—in messages to papers and news channels—calls himself Anikilator. And, yes, maybe the protagonist of “Lost” should encounter the protagonist of “Loss” in a third story. The two of them singing Mahler and Rückert’s “Kindertotenlieder” in loud voices, with those dissonant verses of children who have gone ahead and dawdled along the way, strolling through a landscape about to be ravaged by a storm. The two of them clashing together in a final cosmic duel, like in the old and monstrous movies where Dracula battled Frankenstein’s monster while Wolfman and the Mummy commentated on the fight from the castle sidelines.

  In “Lottery,” parents outside a school silently watch the slow but incessant eclipse of a terminally ill boy. At the end, when they see him come out in a wheelchair, almost a smiling skeleton, they can’t keep from crying. Crying with one eye for the boy’s pain. With the other eye, they cry from the unspeakable joy they feel, because that boy isn’t theirs, because statistically speaking this won’t happen to them.

  In “Slow Suicides,” one winter morning . . . Actually he doesn’t have the slightest idea what “Slow Suicides” is about. All he has is the title—but he likes the title so much . . . Or maybe he does know what it’s about, knows now, suddenly and all at once: “Slow Suicides” tells the story of a literary titan—inspired by Thomas Mann perhaps—who is the father of two sons with artistic predilections, but who, in the saturnine shadow of their father, commit suicide, leaving him a note asking that he, if nothing else, make something great and noble out of them in the world of fiction. And the great writer—who has touched and stroked and taken on everything in his novels and stories—comes up with nothing—nothing to tell. For the first time. The story ends with the writer, in the solitude of his study, asking himself whether—having never felt it before—this lack of inspiration, might not be the closest thing to the pain of losing a child that he’ll ever experience in his life and work.

  The other title that at first he doesn’t know what to do with, but which subsequently becomes suddenly clear is “Anterior to Zero.” In it, a boy dies in an absurd accident, at school, during recess, a small blow striking the precise fatal spot. They offer to let the father see his son, his son’s body, and at first he says yes, but then he wonders if maybe it would be better not to, to not superimpose that stillness over so much movement, to remember him alive, living, full of life, a boy forever.

  “All the Dead Children” starts out as, in appearance, nothing more than a list of the young children who died in the name of literature. Little bodies that stopped breathing in order to take the readers’ breath away. The youngest and greatest of the Buddenbrooks; the unforgettable Annabel “Lee” Leigh in her seaside principality; Walt Garp; the little daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara; the one who expires in the arms of his governess in the phantasmagoric halls of Bly; the one whom Bob Slocum embraces in the most loving of strangulations . . . But before long, reading it, you get the sense and then realize almost immediately that they’re all there, but one. The one whom the narrator, invisible yet omnipresent, cannot name and who doesn’t appear in any novel or story. The real name of an actual boy. The boy whose name and body and shadow he distracts himself from with the names of so many other dead immortals.

  In “And That’s When the Trouble Started,” an adolescent boy again tells his father the same thing he’s been telling him all his life: that when he grows up—not long now—he’s going to be what he already is even though he hasn’t published anything yet: a writer. His father tells him that it’d be better to pursue a career where he could make a living from writing. Writing ad copy, for example. And, since the boy ignores him, the father tells him he’ll send his stories to a writer friend of his who runs a magazine, to put him in his place. So he does, and the writer friend invites the son to write for the magazine. And the son makes a living doing that while writing his first book, which doesn’t go at all badly for him. From that point on, the father never stops asking and forbidding him to “put him in one of his little stories,” but always wishes he would.

  In “A Model to Disassemble,” a father—as a way to punish a son who hasn’t put away his toys—takes a complex and unique and unrepeatable Lego model and lets it fall to the floor and smiles as he watches it crash, in slow motion, from multiple angles at the same time, a thousand Legos, in hundreds of pieces. And that primitive and unforgivable satisfaction turns into guilt and fear when he finds his son watching him with eyes where, for the first time, “the small pupils of the little boy dilate with a new gleam; and that gleam is the beginning of something from which there’s no return and no end, the beginning of hate: hate begins here and now, those eyes tell him; hate, whose engines will keep on running until the end of your days and even beyond, Daddy.”

  In “What Will Be,” and regarding the impossibility of giving children a good education and making all the right decisions for their future, a father at a party, holding and held up by a glass full to the brim with whiskey, says: “My little Leo never walked in on me and his mother making love . . . I wonder if that’ll end up being a good thing or a bad thing for the development of his personality. What do you think, gorgeous?”

  In “Will Be,” a man, in the exact instant of the orgasm that kicks off the story of his paternity (there goes that spermatozoid to dance inside that ovum), experiences the petit mort of being
able to, in a matter of seconds, contemplate his entire future as a parent. The joy and sadness and confusion that await him along the way and the death of his condition as the last of his bloodline. Then, right away, he forgets all of it. Better that way. Otherwise it might be like one of those stories that, before long, night after night, he’ll tell to his future son (a story his son will memorize, down to the last word and inflection, delighted by knowing everything that’s coming, down to the last detail) who’s already there, on this side, forever.

  At the end of “Correction,” a mother asks her daughter—while at the same time she answers herself; because it’s one of those questions that is actually a statement with just a solitary and final word catching the question mark—“You don’t have any reason to resent me, right?” To which the daughter responds: “I resent you for nothing; which is not the same thing.”

  In “With Childish Handwriting,” only a few words are written: “Daddy Dearest: for your information, starting today, I’ll be sleeping with a big knife under my pillow. Your daughter, M.”