The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Now The Lonely Man is on his way out, now he goes and looks outside, now the doors open on their own and the clinic expels him like a whale tired of having him inside.

  Portrait of a Lonely Man leaving the Emergency Room, almost giving little leaps. “Hop, Hop, Hopper!,” he says at first. “How ridiculous,” he says and then makes an excuse: relief tends to favor outbursts of things like that, bad jokes, silly ideas. Relief metabolizes and infantilizes badly and turns you not into one of those smart kids, but into a childish and amino-acidic adult. There’s nothing for him to do there now. In that sanctuary for the grave and the acute, now he’s the most impertinent of intruders. It’s not that he feels perfectly fine, but he’s on the mend. He can feel the slow but constant retreat of both the malady and the accompanying fear—as if a very heavy blanket were being slowly pulled off his body—and, all at once, the consoling tenderness of the night, of the end of a night, from which he returns certain that he’ll see a new day.

  But we’re not quite there yet.

  He takes a deep breath of air that’s soft with jasmine and that tastes new and that has the nameless color used to mix all colors and that sounds like music sounds seconds before composing itself. Suddenly, like a wild celebration of the senses, everything is brighter and more fragrant and sounds clearer and feels better and is as catchy as the best song of summer.

  And, without looking back, The Lonely Man goes slowly down the stairs. Step by step. Counting them, like when he was a kid, like when each and every thing is counted because everything counts.

  And then he realizes: something has changed inside him; he’s not the same person he was when he arrived here a couple hours ago, hours that now, in his memory, have the weight of something that happened centuries ago, like something almost legendary. The Lonely Man looks at his feet and it’s as if his sense of perspective and distance have been altered slightly, just a little, but still producing the discombobulation of someone who is both near-sighted and far-sighted and who can’t find their glasses anywhere and searches for them throughout the house, as if with the cautious footsteps of an astronaut. As if he were walking through the air, floating, but just a centimeter off the ground. Nobody would be aware of the miracle or the stigma. But it’s enough for him to understand that everything has changed forever, that nothing is going to go back to how it was. The Lonely Man wonders where this sudden rarefication of his atmosphere might have come from. Maybe it’s the effects of the implanted terror gland being activated, like in those lyrical extraterrestrials from that science fiction comic he read so many times, so many years ago, when they were still looking for irrefutable proof of intelligent life on other planets. Or maybe it’s just the physical manifestation of a new mental lightness, the direct consequence—keeping his promise—of saying goodbye to all of that, of not being obligated to write anything anymore, nothing, never, ever, forever. Maybe.

  There’s no hurry.

  He’ll find an explanation.

  Or, if not, he’s sure—some lives have no cure, just the relief that comes with death—that an explanation will find him. He’ll happen to think of something that’ll make something happen, something will happen that’ll make him happen to think of something.

  He could swear it.

  He could swear—though he’s promised to give up writing so he can keep being written—that he always wanted to come up with something that would end, that would end so that something else could begin, with the words “he could” and “swear it.”

  But, of course, it’d be a lie.

  So, better, he decides to keep going for a few more lines, up the mountain, to his house, to his library, to his desk.

  The distance from the clinic door to the doors of the funicular is, it seems to him, the slightest and most appropriate of ellipses. He covers it as if in a sigh. A sigh of terrified happiness. The happiness of knowing that the times he’ll be this happy in what’s left of his life are numbered and that, inevitably, another doctor, closer and closer in time and space, won’t tell him “Everything’s fine” but to the contrary: “Something’s wrong.”

  Now The Lonely Man is going back up and, on the way, it’s inevitable to think it, because all of a sudden everything he does seems to carry the possibility of being definitive. Yes: someday he’ll take his last ride in the funicular. Up or down? In an ambulance, or to catch a ride in another moving truck?

  Who knows.

  And who cares.

  It’s not something he’s too worried about right now—the direction—and, yes, it’s something he doesn’t want to think about too much. He’s only interested in enjoying being back here instead of having had to stay down there.

  Amid the cyclists and runners, he watches the funicular arrive, full of kids in school uniforms and parents who seem to be wondering how this happened, how they got there, where have all these restless little creatures come from. That’s their problem, they’re in charge, nobody forced them, free will, efficient contraceptives, should’ve thought about it more and better, he thinks. He neither had nor has nor will he ever have anything to do with any of that. He has nobody to miss him and nobody to miss. The only responsibility The Lonely Man has now is to himself and it’s the responsibility to go up, to go up. With no one to answer to. No obligation to explain anything. Alone and one-of-a-kind and beginning and ending in the journey of himself, as if pulling his own cable to propel himself into the heights. A simple mechanism in appearance, on a track that’s impossible to modify, but so complex in its scope and in the mental detours that can be attained inside it.

  He’s so happy to be going home and his home begins there, inside the funicular.

  Funicular, sweet funicular.

  Can you miss a funicular?

  Can a funicular become an important part of your life?

  Can you love a funicular more than you love a person?

  Yes and yes and yes.

  I hope so, he prays.

  Now it’s already tomorrow and the doors open and over the loudspeakers a recorded voice states that you have to let people exit before you can enter.

  And it seems to him a formidable phrase, perfect advice, something with aphoristic resonance, as if extracted from millennia of religious texts: but (he brings his hand to the notebook and stops halfway there and, could this be happiness?, he could swear it is) he has no idea where to insert it, to use it, to make it his own by writing it down.

  He could swear it.

  MANY FÊTES, OR STUDY FOR A GROUP PORTRAIT WITH BROKEN DECALOGUES

  † “Have you read all these books?” she asks.

  † The biji is a genre of classic Chinese literature. “Biji” can be translated, roughly yet more or less faithfully, as “notebook.” And a biji can contain curious anecdotes, nearly blind quotations, random musings, philosophical speculations, private theories regarding intimate matters, criticism of other works, and anything that its owner and author deems appropriate. Do samurais interrupt the conversation of their katanas to write down something that occurs to them in the precise instant of blood and steel? Did geishas write bijis in the tight silk straps that they bound their feet with to keep them from growing? Ah, yes . . . A biji always at hand, just in case, you never know. A biji like the written and unplugged equivalent of one of those mobile phones used to photograph anything, everything, and nothing. The different items in a biji can be numbered, but, also, it’s possible to read them not according to any order, opening a path for ourselves, starting at any point and jumping back and forth or up and down or side to side. Beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. The idea is that, one way or another, each reader ends up discovering a story as unique as her reading. The biji genre appeared for the first time during the Wei and Jin dynasties, and reached full maturity during the Tang and Song dynasties. The biji of that period include, also and in an almost featured role, fragments of the “believe it or not” variety, anticipating the Believe It or Not! comic strip created by the supposed explorer and slig
htly mythomaniacal adventurer Robert Ripley, for the pages of a newspaper at the beginning of the twentieth century. So, many of the entries in the biji format can be thought of as little fictions detaching themselves from one great fiction, that, though secret, is there nonetheless, waiting to be discovered. (Please, don’t confuse a biji with one of those oh so hip—ever since the amusing dictatorship of one-hundred-forty characters installed itself—microstories. Those witticisms that everyone writes or tries to write and with which even he, once, tried to win—and lost, under a pseudonym—a contest. With the following: “Amnesia / Somewhere in La Mancha, somewhere I cannot remember.” And that is, and was, it.)

  Now he, it’s not that he wants to, but that he can remember. And he arranges and unarranges these pages, telling and deluding himself that he’s revisiting the biji genre, so he doesn’t have to admit that they are, in reality, just the windblown tatters of fallen standards and the still-smoking ruins of something that he wanted to build but that came crashing down. The broken pieces of a temple he believed in or needed to believe in. The shrapnel from an explosion extracted, piece-by-piece, from the wounded but surviving body of something, of someone. The loose phrases of that thing—trying to swim underwater and hold his breath—he wanted to write so badly, but couldn’t, a while back now, sometime during the great droughts that marked the Crack dynasty.

  † Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.” And reading that, at the end of a volume of letters from the author of Tender Is the Night to his daughter Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald (could there be anything more dreadful than a father giving his own name to his own daughter, with only the slightest orthographic but not sonic modification?), he can’t help but recall that he learned to write (to write very well for someone his age) long before he learned to swim (to swim very badly for someone his age).

  † “Writers aren’t people exactly.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.

  † Exactly, Scott. Writers are people who, inexactly, always prefer to look away, toward another part—the invented part.

  † “Dick tried to dissect it [the charm] into pieces small enough to store away—realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life in the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night.

  † “Action is character,” yes, and The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald—edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli—are for him, along with the notebooks and notes of Henry James and Franz Kafka and John Cheever, the greatest example of the journal that he knows of: one of the most perfect and sensitive and romantic books of bijis. Sometimes he opens it at random, as if it were the Bible or the I Ching or the phone book, and reads the first thing his eyes come across and trip over. Right now, for example:

  “Escape and so we have the Escape Autobiography.”

  And later:

  “The very elements of disintegration seemed romantic to him.”

  And one more:

  “My mind is the loose cunt of a whore, to fit all genitals.”

  And another:

  “There are certain ribald stories that I heard at ten years old and never again, for I heard a new and more sophisticated set at eleven. Many years later I heard a ten-year-old boy telling another one of those old stories and it occurred to me that it had been handed on from one ten-year-old generation to the next for an incalculable number of centuries. So with the set I learned at eleven. Each set of stories, like a secret ritual, stays always within its age-class, never growing older because there is always a new throng of ten-year-olds to learn them, and never growing stale because these same boys will forget them at eleven. One can almost believe that there is a conscious theory behind this unofficial education.”

  And below:

  “In a real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning.”

  And a bit farther down:

  “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

  And to finish up, for now:

  “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

  And enough for today.

  † This is your heroic precipice. If you ask it something, it sends back the echo of your question:

  † “Have you read all these books?” she asks. Not with the shrill voice of the microstory but with the sensual and attractive voice of the biji. And he feels like he’s drowning and floating at the same time. And her voice—her tone, her way of asking the question, as if mocking herself before others can mock her and her question—makes him remember something. And he can’t remember what it is that it makes him remember. Something—he’d enjoy this—a little Lost in Translation. A “mature” man and an “innocent” girl. Long and slow and pleasantly tense conversations. Singing a perfectly lousy rendition of “More Than This.” Romance. Like in Tender Is the Night. Like Dick Diver and Rosemary Hoyt. But here and now. And without all the drama or background noise. Something more comfortable. And wise. Feeling like Bill Murray. Having Bill Murray’s face, which is, for him, the most comfortable of faces. The face of the man with whom all the men fell in love when they watched Lost in Translation and—to not admit this, not admit it to themselves, not admit it—they lied to themselves that they’d fallen in love with Scarlett Johansson. But really, they’d fallen in love with Bill Murray, with Bill Murray’s face. A face with personality and simultaneously sensitive and somewhat tired of everything and everyone, and that wasn’t too much to ask from the face of a famous person, he believes, he’s always believed that. But no. He thinks for a few seconds, focuses, and then the relief of remembering so like the relief of sneezing. The pleasure of finally locating the precise reference in the archive of his memory. He lives each of those moments—from when he was a boy with his hard and overflowing storage drive, up to this present where his corrupt files melt together and some get confused with others—with a strange pride. The pride of remembering, of making memory, the thing most like writing for someone who doesn’t write anymore.

  † And what does the question “Have you read all these books?” remind him of? And what does the voice that says, “Have you read all these books?” remind him of? Easy, he lifts a hand and presses the button to deliver the correct answer: that moment on Pink Floyd’s The Wall (first the album and later the movie) when a girl goes into Pink’s hotel room and asks, with a sexy and mocking voice, “Are all these your guitars,” and then, “Are you feeling okay?” And no: Pink is not feeling O.K. at all, but he is feeling more than ready to K.O. his TV, his room, his life. He’s not really like that, like Pink; kind of though. But he loves his TV too much.

  † The young woman who now asks “Have you read all these books?” (the answer is no, he hasn’t read all of them; but he has looked at them and held them and touched them and flipped through them; he has been collecting them with the idea of someday reading them and because he needs to have them with him, nearby) must be about twenty-five, but, at the same time, ten. Or almost eleven. In a few months—when she’s given a new set of stories—she’ll forget the whole “ribald” story that might end up taking time and taking place inside the walls of his house. And, within a few years, the young woman who won’t be a young woman anymore will be struck by a sound or a few words or whatever and she’ll ask herself what it makes her remember. And the answer will be him. But it’ll be one of those difficult and elusive answers, because . . .

  † . . . nothing actually happens. Nothing is going to happen. No fluid exchange of any kind. Nothing memorable, good or bad. Because he’s always taken pride in not entering into any kind of carnal commerce with the aid of a certain literary perfume. But a couple hours ago, he’d decided: there’s a first time for everything. At a writers’ party, the kind he goes to less and less, being more and more a minor or “cult” writer. And he’d forgiven himself in advance with a “It’s allowed now, since I don’t
write anymore, right?” But, before long, he says to himself, noble but also worried that his body and concentration won’t cooperate, that no: he’s not going to start now, not going to renounce his oath after so many years. And—writers, whose work it is to be convincing and who, paradoxically and ironically, are beings who have no trouble convincing themselves of anything; writers are so superstitious—he believes that the renewal of that commitment earns him, on the spot, a prize, or, at least, a ranking so that he can run another race.

  Because now the girl says:

  † “Those are your parents? What lunatics!”

  † And the girl is holding a photo that was sitting on his desk. Framed. And signed: “To the REAL Golden Couple, from S&G,” it says. And it’s not a photo of his parents (it isn’t them), but it is his parents’ photo (given to them). It’s obvious and it’d even be obvious to a ten- or eleven-year-old kid that, judging by the period when that man and woman in the photo were photographed, there’s no way they could be his parents. Maybe his grandparents. Again: even a kid could figure this out. But a twenty-five-year-old girl doesn’t necessarily understand what a kid understands, she no longer possesses those intuitive yet efficient faculties—like the echo of an unforgettable vacation that you no longer remember—and she’s lost in intelligence what she’s gained in sexual allure. It’s not her fault, of course. It’s the time she lives in, he thinks. This futuristic present where the past—everything that passed in the past—is sloppily assembled, like in the hangar of the unfortunate Citizen Kane, with no regard for eras and periods, knowing that there’s no problem, that nothing’s missing, that to assign a date to something it’s no longer necessary to waste time memorizing important dates or to have a clear understanding of even a primitive schema of the history of Humanity. Now, to make time all you have to do is type in that new “Presto!” that is the word “Google.”