The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  He read somewhere—in one of those increasingly frequent books warning, like fiery prophets, of the consequences of the end of reading for the human body and soul—that the first thing you lose when you stop reading is the more or less clear understanding of the abstraction of time. If you don’t start reading as a child, if you don’t incorporate and accept the deceptive yet indispensable idea of time gained and time lost, of the time that passes between the time when the hero is condemned and the time when he gets his revenge, they say you lose all form of temporal orientation and inhabit the idea of a continuum where everything happens simultaneously. Like what happens to Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

  † Of course, to understand—and enjoy, and admire—what happens to Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, first you have to have read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

  † He’d become a writer because it was the closest thing to being a reader. And when he says and thinks “reading” he means reading books, sitting or lying down or walking and moving. Turning pages to acquire a different time and a different velocity.

  What time is it?

  Whatever time it is in the book.

  It’s no good—it’s cheating, it’s not the same—to read on a screen where the time and the hour are always whatever the device we plug ourselves into indicates. So, the girl who asks if he read all those books is a girl who reads a lot but doesn’t read anything, and what she reads isn’t measured in books anymore but in who knows what.

  † There was a time when parties or film or TV or alcohol or drugs or sex or politics or sunsets pulled us away from books.

  Now—surprise!—it’s the books that pull us away from the books.

  The electronic books that prevent us from concentrating for more or less long stretches of reading without feeling the reflexive and automatic temptation to jump to another place, another site, another front, to tangle ourselves in social networks and, suddenly, it’s already time to go and update our profile. On screens—big and small screens—where our lives are no longer projected because our lives, now, more all the time, are screens.

  To be or not to be a screen, that is the question.

  Being there.

  And a while back he read an interview with Philip Roth, where the writer, once called the “the Jewish Fitzgerald” and now retired from writing, mused: “Where are the readers? Looking at their computer screens, TV screens, movie theaters, DVDs. Distracted by more pleasurable formats. The screens have defeated us.” And referring to the Kindle—the, at the time, most recent incarnation of the electronic book—Roth said: “I haven’t seen it yet, I know it’s around, but I doubt it will replace an artifact like the book. The key isn’t to transfer books to electronic screens. It’s not that. No. The problem is that literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. As if in order to read we needed an antenna and it’d been cut. The signal doesn’t arrive. The concentration, the solitude, the imagination that the habit of reading requires. We’ve lost the war. In twenty years, reading will be a cult . . . It’ll be a minority hobby. Some people will raise dogs and tropical fish, others will read.”

  † The evidently antennaless girl who asked him if he’d read all those books is already on to something else, she’s already changed channels, she’s already examining the results of a new search—the photo of his parents who are not his parents.

  The man and the woman who appear in the photo—“What lunatics!”—are dressed up as robotic automobiles. Vintage transformers.

  And their names are Sara and Gerald Murphy.

  The photo has the sepia amber color acquired by everything that passed, that already was yet continues to be, when it’s preserved, frozen in time.

  The photo was taken in 1924 by Man Ray at the automobilistic costume party that Comte Étienne de Baumont threw at some ballroom in Côte d’Azur.

  The photo was dedicated and delivered to his parents at some point in the early sixties, before he was born. His parents, who never owned a car or learned to drive and that was for the best—he would’ve never risked getting in a car with either of them behind steering wheel.

  And now the photo—and the possible prize that’s revealed to him and that he accepts out of the confusion of couples, of those mechanical parents that are not his parents—gives him an idea.

  And it’s been so long since he had one . . .

  And so, making up some excuse, he asks the girl to please go, before, like in Pink’s hotel room, everything starts flying through the air.

  † But through the air of his head, of his imagination, of what he might someday, once again end up writing. And desperate, as if dying of thirst and confronting the sudden materialization of an oasis that, he prays, he hopes is not a mirage, he searches for and finds his notebook of bijis. And there he finds and reads . . .

  † . . . a long parenthetical that—cut & paste—he extracted from somewhere else because it bothered him. And that appears here to bother him even more. A kind of statement of purpose that, of course, has been written in a way that clearly confirms that he won’t be able to achieve that purpose:

  “(Here he comes from so far away, so far away that it’s as if he were arriving from an alternate dimension, from a possible maybe, ah, another parentheses like an expansive wave. And The Boy who is now running along a beach doesn’t yet possess the necessary knowledge to resist the torrent that, within a few years, will translate into many, numerous novels and stories. Some very good, many very bad. Some and others will receive awards and praise for their audacity and he tries to not forget, to remember all of it. To remember both the time The Boy lives in now and his childhood. Testimonial texts. The chronicle like a chronic illness. Authors who assure you they trembled when they assumed the responsibility of putting it all down in writing. As if they’d been chosen for it. As if it were a divine mission communicated by a beam of light descending from the heavens where, presently, they’ll aspire to ascend, sanctified, evangelized. Pages about fathers and sons swept away by the tornado of History. And “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” will be one of The Boy’s favorite lines from one of his favorite movies. A line he’ll say to himself in the deafeningly quiet voice of thoughts every time he crosses paths with one of those books attached to its author. Men and women and the idea that mechanically describing something evil automatically makes you good and—change of guard and ages—new motifs, but not motivation, for describing another damned decade. The damned decade when The Boy will be an enlightened and eternal youth or something like that and will find certain success and uncertain fame with his first book, which, of course, is about the previous damned decade. Again: opening updated instruction manuals to maneuver complicated pieces of a simple Meccano model. Or simple pieces of a complicated Meccano model. Either way, it’s all the same. All you’ll have to do is carefully follow the steps, assembling the model so it can be disassembled again and again and again. Storytellers wrapped in a pale-colored flag so easy to sully, tearing their clothes, frenetically dancing the tango of the blues. A plethora of cuts and breaks and contortions across the stages and fairs of the world. Novels and stories like those villagers with torches, running up the hill, in pursuit of Frankenstein’s monster, who only wants to be left in peace. And for them to, please, stop calling him Frankenstein all the time; for them to get it through their heads once and for all that the doctor is Frankenstein, not him, right? And The Boy doesn’t know it yet, but his thing, what’s to come, what he’ll bring to the table—a villager with a torch running down the hill, pursued by hundreds of Frankenstein’s monsters—won’t be the novelization of adolescent or adult terrorism, but will always depart from childhood horrorism. Something else. Childhood as trauma—his childhood, so happy despite everything—and the intimate and domestic warfare of his parents. Both appearing and disappearing and reappearing like a black cloud with silver lining covering the sun. And, soon thereafter, below the surface and in th
e background, the multiple historical and hysterical avatars of his now nonexistent country of origin. His parents’ emotional life, like a backdrop where, yes, there will also be a dangerous and compromising political moment resulting in another of the no-longer-so-young boy’s many “accidents.” An accident that, in turn, will become a story in his first book. A vaudeville with kidnappers that becomes the final stepping-stone to his literary vocation, functioning like a series of variations of an inalterable aria and coda. A story with an ending modified in relation to the reality that inspired it. In the story, his parents reappear. In reality, they never did. Like those exasperating and paradoxical and complex movies about time travel that The Boy will become such a fan of. Those movies that make you work so hard. Those movies that will return him, time and again, from the darkness of the movie theater to the light of the outside world. Thinking and analyzing, his head aching, the dizzying twists of each movie’s concentric and dazzling plotlines, wondering what happened, what’s happening, what will happen, what might happen if . . .)”

  † And after reading this, he writes: “Sara & Gerald Murphy/Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald + My parents (my sister) + Tender Is the Night + that unavoidable son of a bitch Ernest Hemmingway + And all the rest of them too + . . . and so it goes.”

  And he sits down to see what happens.

  † And so many things happen.

  † For him, there are two great moments in the writing of a book.

  First, the moment when he happens to think of the book and the book happens and he sees it complete and perfect and singular and, without a doubt, it’s the best book he’ll ever write and that’ll ever be written. That kind of euphoric/adrenalinic ecstasy is, of course, a form of self-deception. That “tunnel vision” that, they say, soldiers experienced in World War One (what was then called The Great War, because it was inconceivable that another war would take place after it), in order to convince themselves to come out of the trenches to see what was happening.

  Second, the moment when everything has ended and has been consummated and consumed. When the last word (which often isn’t the last one that everyone else will read) is written and he looks at it as if he just returned from the battlefront. And, sure, his report isn’t as impeccable as he imagined it, and it’s possible that he won’t get a medal. But at least he’s alive and he lived to tell the tale, to tell his tale.

  Between the one extreme and the other occurs, yes, the long during: The Great War and, in his case, the Second and Third and Fourth and Fifth and Sixth and Seventh and Eighth and, if he’s lucky again, one more time, the Ninth World War.

  † And if there’s something he appreciates about the Internet, it’s the ease of arming yourself, of doing research. Not for reading (because he still uses encyclopedias and dictionaries), but, yes, for obtaining assorted materials cheaply and having them sent to his front door. Through the mail. Soon, they say, everything will arrive aboard an Amazonic Drone, one of those aircrafts that today are used to spy and kill and certify the nonexistent existence of weapons of mass destruction. So, flying, biographies, memoirs, volumes of letters. Everything about Sara and Gerald and FSF and Zelda and catalogues of posthumous exposés and articles in glossy magazines and, little by little, he even allows himself, with a shame he doesn’t understand because nobody sees it (though, of course, they see everything), an incursion into the virtual skies of Google Earth and in and out of Wikipedia’s entrances and exits. He discovers, in addition, that there’s a very good Tender Is the Night miniseries, adapted by Dennis Potter, but never released on DVD. And that copies of Tender Is the Night appear, randomly, in scenes of the films: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Wim Wenders’s Alice in den Städten, and Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door. And he asks himself if any of that will be useful to him somewhere and for something, for his idea; and he answers that he doesn’t know, but that everything already seems to indicate that—if it turns into a book—that book is going to be very long and very wide and very tall.

  Trouble . . .

  † It begins flying over the exact site where Boston native and member of a well-to-do family Gerald Clery Murphy (1888-1964) builds a beach with his own hands, rescuing it from the action of the brush and algae and waves. Gerald Murphy creates a beach for love. A love that lasts sixty years, until the day of his death, for the daughter of a wealthy Ohio clan and now his wife—Sara Sherman Wiburg (1883-1975). A beach near Antibes, Côte d’Azur. A brief line of sand and rocks, adjacent to their house, Villa America. A beach Gerald Murphy will christen La Garoupe. Villa America—along with Château de Clavary in Auribeau, where Russell Greeley sketches; Château de Mai en Mougins, where Francis Picabia paints; and Villa Noailles in Hyère, where Count and Countess Noailles throw their masquerade balls—is one of the four cardinal points in the Riviera, where life is lived for the love of art. But Villa America is the most luxurious of all. And everyone is welcome. And everyone answers the call of those rich Americans—“masters of the art of living,” as someone passing through describes them—who premiere the art of sun bathing at La Garoupe. Of lying out under the ultraviolet rays until they look gold and become the golden couple everyone celebrates because the golden couple celebrates everyone. The façade of Villa America is like the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, except the Murphys aren’t The Beatles. The Murphys are more like those great “character” actors. First rate B-roll actors who, having been abducted by Hollywood, had no doubt shared a table in Rick’s Café Americain, in Casablanca, with Peter Lorre or Sidney Greenstreet. Sara and Gerald Murphy are the light that draws the enlightened. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), Robert Benchley (1889-1945), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), John Dos Passos (1896-1970), Serguéi Diáguilev (1872-1929), Erik Satie (1866-1925), Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), John O’Hara (1905-1970), Cole Porter (1891-1964), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1977), Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) and ladies: the imminent ex and the immediate next, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) and, much later on, his father (1936-1978) and mother (1939-1978), and now he has set out to write a novel about Sara and Gerald Murphy and everything and everyone that surrounded them, his parents and himself included.

  † “Every day was different,” Gerald Murphy in a letter to Calvin Tomkins.

  † Sara and Gerald Murphy flee the United States because they feel that everything there is preordained, as if already written and sealed by a protocol that doesn’t allow for improvisation or innovation. The American bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche of the new empire, dream of being European aristocrats but can’t know or imagine that Europe no longer is what it once was. Now, Europe is what it is and Europe is what it will be. In Europe, in the Old World, everything seems new to the Murphys.

  † And Europe, yes. And Tender Is the Night like the natural and enhanced evolution of those Henry James novels in which Americans traveled around the Old World to expose themselves to the new and initiating radiation of going more or less mad or less or more sane. Transfigured, in any case. Tourism as a way of illuminating kilometers or miles of darkness. And Tender Is the Night—which also could’ve been called The Portrait of Another Lady or The Ambassador—makes the treacherous fidelity between James and Fitzgerald even more apparent. James believed that we are defined by the objects and places that surround us, Fitzgerald goes even further and tells us that we end up becoming the objects and places that surround us: shirts, cars, hotels, bottles, toys, starry skies, and beaches where we can shine like the stars. (Relevant detail and parenthetical that, maybe, explains something of his not-model model-parents’ fascination with Fitzgerald: the author of Tender Is the Night starts out as a copy editor in the New York ad agency Baron Collier. His biggest hit was the slogan for a Laundromat in Iowa, Muscatine Steam Laundry: “We Keep You Clean in Muscatine.” Before long, Fitzgerald convinces himself that it
’s not for him, starts drinking more, goes back to his parents’ house, and concentrates on his first novel. And he turns himself into the best product of himself, strengthened by the addition of a certain Zelda Sayre. And together they live Tender Is the Night. They write it later. But it doesn’t end up being all that easy to sell.)

  † One night Gerald and Sara Murphy are going to have a dinner party, but they can’t find flowers to decorate the tables. The florists are closed or fresh flowers weren’t delivered. Or something like that. So the two of them go down the stairs and run to the nearest toy store and fill a large wicker basket with windup tin toys. During dessert, Picasso gets really excited about a fire truck. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, picks out a little man carrying a suitcase, and he winds it up and watches it walk from here to there, across the tablecloth, and, sadly, he says: “It reminds me of me.”

  † Detail to be inserted in some part of the book: Sara and Gerald Murphy are like fugitives from an Edith Wharton novel who end being taken prisoner by a Francis Scott Fitzgerald novel.

  † And he’s already begun to receive Murphian materials. And, as the rest of what he has ordered from virtual and invisible libraries arrives, he rereads Tender Is the Night: his parents’ favorite novel, not because they especially admired Fitzgerald, but because they’d met his direct inspiration, and meeting them had inspired his parents to try to be like them, and they liked reading a novel whose characters they’d met. And he photocopies essays about Tender Is the Night and assembles a bulging dossier. And he transcribes paragraphs from the novel’s prologues. And even underlines a companion that investigates the slow and suffering history of its writing, across various years and countries and hospitals.

  But he doesn’t want to delve into that night just yet and, in the beginning, he focuses on the day of the Murphys. On the nonfiction of the fiction.