The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

† Not long ago, an enthusiastic and young documentary maker contacted him to ask if he was interested in participating in “something that I’m putting together about your parents . . . About the story of the guerilla cell known as The Murphys.”

  He, of course, cordially invited him to take a hike.

  † This is the story: Christmas Eve 1977, his parents and their friends, models and artists and publicists and beautiful people, storm a prestigious department store branch and, within a few hours, are “subdued by the forces of order.”

  Note: But, warning, the “political” part—the most rotten part of all—will only take up a few lines, like something rarely seen or heard. He’s been there before. He doesn’t want to go back. He leaves it for the scavenger birds and animals of prey that deal in such things, for the new generations of patriotic resuscitators of the dear living dead.

  Another note: This part of the novel (and it will be very complex) will be built around the testimonies of hostages, between terror and wonder, seeing themselves subdued by “that couple from those ads on a sailboat.” Some of them won’t be able to stop admiring the perfect cut and tailoring of their guerilla-chic style uniforms. Someone will ask for their autographs and to take a picture with them. And his parents, of course, will comply. And they smile at the camera. And that oh so Murphian photo will appear on the front page of daily and weekly newspapers in the coming days and weeks.

  Stop the presses.

  † And “subdued by the forces of order” means that the army comes in with tanks and bazookas and many people die, among them several customers who were there buying Christmas presents.

  The attack is filmed by news cameras and (not long ago he saw those shaky scenes again) the quality of the film is curiously similar to the postcards of battles from World War One. Something that looks much older than it actually is.

  Then he understands the motives and reasons why that girl asked him if that photo of the Murphys was of his parents. The past makes everything uniform. In the past—even if you read to keep from succumbing to that defect—everything happens at the same time, everything piles up in the same corner, and each event only steps forward when its number, the number of its day and year and century, gets called. But it does so in its own way.

  † The past is an old child, obedient and bad-mannered at the same time.

  † The past is a broken toy that everyone fixes in his own way.

  † It was never clear if his parents died during the retaking of the department store or if, weeks later, they were thrown from a seaplane into the waters off that beach where they used to take him on vacation and where one time he almost drowned without them noticing.

  And inconfessable confession, inadmissible admission: he’s increasingly convinced that he’d benefitted from his parents’ disappearance. And not just because it made him seem so much more interesting when he published his first book where his parents’ disappearance made an appearance. But because, now, in addition, with that national tragedy already somewhat worn out and faded, but not entirely out of style, he shuddered whenever people he knew told him of awful episodes with their parents, who not only hadn’t disappeared but who, like apparitions, were increasingly here and there and everywhere: parents who fell and broke bones, parents who complained about everything and reproached and accused, parents who got lost out in the streets, parents who rewrote their pasts at their convenience and for their pleasure, parents whom you had to wash and change and feed. In the name of the past, thank you for your sperm, thank you for your ovum, thank you for the love or the mistake of that crazy night that brought me here. Thanks for nothing.

  His parents, on the other hand, hadn’t even left behind good-looking corpses. His parents were like dead stars whose light still twinkled a little, from so many dark years of unfathomable cosmic distance. His parents were, yes—a good story.

  A survivor of battlefields and torture—a member of The Murphys, an exart director at an ad agency—shows up many years later at the presentation of one of his books and tells him that he’d been detained with his parents. That they were tortured, physically and psychologically. That they were forced to play a cross between Russian Roulette and William Tell. That they were made to shoot each other with a gun, loaded with a single bullet. That he wasn’t sure if his mother killed his father or his father killed his mother.

  And he walked away, the way you walk away from something that you don’t know whether it causes you pain or fear, thinking “William Burroughs.”

  In any case, what happened happened, and after that, for him and Penelope, Christmas was always a strange time.

  † That oft-cited moment in Tender Is the Night when Fitzgerald describes the way, at a dinner and having surrendered to their guests, watching them with near adoration, Nicole and Dick Diver seem to glow and expand and their faces are “like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree.”

  † The photos of the Fitzgeralds are so different from photos of the Murphys. While those of the latter are always fluid, elegant, amusing, their bodies always slender as if suspended in the perfection of a second, the photos of the Fitzgeralds always look rigid, frozen, like little dolls who have fled from the top of a wedding cake and are caught by surprise at dances, on boat decks, and with their daughter in front of a Christmas tree in a Paris flat, practicing an awkward cancan where they barely lift their legs as if afraid they’ll break, break beyond all possible repair.

  † So, in his novel, the narrator will have a love-hate relationship with Christmas and, throughout its pages, he’ll insert reflections and memories of the holiday. Examples follow.

  † An equally cruel and funny Christmas card that somebody sent him at some point and that now he has stuck to the corkboard, above his desk. On the card is a drawing of a father surprised by his little son as he places the presents under the tree. The father looks at him over his shoulder, and it’s easy for him to imagine him saying his line (the letters enclosed in a bubble that emerges from his mouth) in the smooth and slippery voice of Robert Mitchum: “What’ve you done, Timmy? Now I have no choice but to kill you,” says the father to the son.

  † Behind the good joke—as tends to occur with all good jokes—pulses the certainty of something grave and possibly ominous: Christmas is a deception that should be preserved at all cost. For centuries, Christmas—the existence of that man who comes down the chimney—has functioned like the Original Lie hissing and coiling around the trunk that links parents and children. So, good behavior and honesty are rewarded vis-à-vis the fabrication of a fallacy whose elucidation—sooner or later—leaves behind a bitter aftertaste. You stop believing in Santa Claus and soon you stop believing in the supposed love that your parents feel for each other and, by extension, in the love they profess for you. And the expansive wave of this initiating deception—its friendly fire, its collateral damage—ends up spanning an entire lifetime. The majority, not of nonbelievers but of ex-believers absorbs the blow with resigned grace; but how many future serial killers and corrupt politicians might have chosen their fate at the foot of that little tree, confronting a father who committed the merciful error of sparing their lives? Today, even encyclopedias cast the whole thing in doubt, or between quotation marks: Christmas is just the Christian rewrite of a pagan myth (the celebration of the solstice where everyone put on masks to fornicate under a great pine tree and conceive all the children that the next spring would bring) or it didn’t even happen when they say it happened.

  The question is, of course: do we believe in Christmas or is it Christmas that believes in us?

  † “Christmas. December 25th. Christian religious festival celebrated throughout the West, whose principal characteristic is the exchange of gifts and the preparation of feasts. Within the Christian Church, Christmas is the day that celebrates the birth of Jesus, even though the true date is unknown. Many Christmas traditions are not of Christian origin and were adapted and changed according to celebrations of the Winter solstice.”—The Words
worth Encyclopedia.

  † Christmas as a supposedly curative pathology. Charles Dickens, Frank Capra, etcetera. Maybe Christmas isn’t a virus. Maybe Christmas is a drug. Highly addictive. Collective hysteria. Unstoppable, almost impossible to kick the habit. A chemical composition that forces you to smile at everyone, and to embrace yourself, and convince yourself that happiness is a possible contrivance. So, the invention of Christmas (and its immediate sequel: The New Year, and its childish coda: Three Kings Day) equals the invention of happiness. Or the happiness of invention.

  † Charles Dickens (a writer for whom the poor, and not the rich, are different) was Fitzgerald’s favorite writer when he was a kid. Dickens was and is, also, one of his favorite writers and David Copperfield was the first novel where, dumbfounded, he discovered that the writer can also be the character—the hero.

  † “My father was a good person,” one of Charles Dickens’ daughters dared whisper, when the pageantry of the writer’s burial was concluded in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey.

  † Fitzgerald’s parents were good people. They worried about him and weren’t too disturbed that he went around saying things like “I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived.” Fitzgerald was not a popular boy. He was too delicate. He looked like a pale-eyed doll. His mother threw him birthday parties that nobody came to. Something similar happened to him with his parents, with his birthdays and everyone else’s birthdays—nobody ever came and he never went to a single one. It’s not that he wasn’t popular among his classmates; it’s that his parents—even though they were famous and celebrities, maybe because of this, plus the stories about them in the press—were not popular among the other parents.

  † Were his parents “good people” despite everything? Taking into account—being atheists in automatic reaction to their own parents’ Catholicism—the importance and enthusiasm that they placed on, in their words, “repaganizing” the holidays with great parties and dances with no shortage of hip drugs (he remembers one Christmas Eve when he and Penelope, feet blistered by new shoes, spent the night trailing after their parents and their parents’ friends, through the streets, from bar to bar, as they insisted on celebrating everything), wouldn’t it have been better if, at least, in the name of their children, they’d picked some day other than Christmas Eve to do what they did?

  It doesn’t matter now.

  One thing is definitely clear: the residual power—just like the secondary damages that Tender Is the Night keeps producing—remains considerable. Not long ago, he took that book with him one night, feeling like he was dying, to the Emergency Room. And just flipping through it, while waiting for his examination and diagnosis, he came up with the idea for a decidedly Fitzgeraldian and autobiographical story.

  In the story, a boy, the son of divorced parents, awaits the verdict that’ll determine with whom he’ll spend Christmas Eve and with whom Christmas. It’s a few days before the holidays and, without knowing it, the boy is photographed by a journalist in the moment that, in the street, a man dressed as Santa Claus gives him a balloon. The boy—who already knows that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and that it’s not even his parents: it’s his grandparents—accepts it with a resigned expression. Then, brief ellipsis and we see and we read the father and the mother, seeing and reading that photo, in separate beds and in different houses, with another woman and another man. The caption says something like: “The happiness of a child is worth a thousand words.”

  And nothing more to say.

  † What happened to him and Penelope after his parents were swept away by the winds of History?

  Little and nothing.

  Uncles and aunts and grandparents. And, especially, that one uncle with kaleidoscopic and dreamy eyes, light and shadow. But in his book, he’ll opt for a Christmassy and Dickensian and Capraesque solution—the appearance of a magic character, half-Fitzgeraldian, half-Dickensian. In a not so reliable first-person (Nick Carraway) or in a fairly implacable third-person.

  Eames “Chip” Chippendale (his movable/noble surname like a complicit wink at himself: Chip like something solid and elegant amid so many IKEA specimens).

  Chip is the owner of a bookstore and one time close friend of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who—he explains—took the trouble to set up a trust (and named him guardian) for the children of a couple they met a while back and with whom they were photographed.

  Chip—who raises him like his own son and turns him into a writer and handles Penelope’s progressive madness with stoicism and grace—explains to him, some time later, that Sara and Gerald Murphy understood immediately that “your parents weren’t going to end well. They knew the symptoms after years of dealing with the Fitzgeralds. And it was clear to them that the kids were going to end up castaways of that great shipwreck. So, measures were taken.”

  † Which doesn’t prevent, of course, the transmission of certain invulnerable bacteria. But, he thinks, isn’t it a little too much to compare Zelda’s madness to Penelope’s and to accuse him—as Fitzgerald was accused, exaggeratedly and with very little foundation, of having taken nibbles from his wife’s diaries on the sly, searching for useful material to use in his stories and novels—of having fed off Penelope’s experiences with her in-laws, cranking up the volume to 11, to nurture one of his books?

  Yes?

  No?

  Neither?

  † One thing is clear: after various comings and going between reason and unreason, Penelope goes irrevocably mad. Mad like Zelda. She goes in and out of sanitoriums like someone carefully planning getaways to places that are unknown to them and that they’ve never heard anyone talk about. But imagining, always, that someone told them it’s a place worth getting to know.

  And that she’ll be happy there.

  For a while.

  † And what Penelope does and what she did is something so horrible that he only dares think of it every so often (he can’t put it writing; and it’s here that he understands that the whole project of his book is beginning to fall apart, that it’s unsustainable, that it’s starting to dissipate, as tends to happen with the diffuse matter of good ideas, so similar to that of dreams) so he can say to himself: “There: now I won’t have to think about it again for a while.”

  And he manages it more and more and that achievement, he realizes, has been making him a less and less admirable human being.

  The trick is to think about what happened by putting it in foreign contexts, like something that happened to other people, like stories written by other people, like lights to be guided by but never to hold responsible.

  † “Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night.

  † The literary value of Zelda Fitzgerald’s work is exceedingly relative, but it wears that exalted perfume of madness and flammable will, stoked by more than one feminist, wanting to see her as the perfect symbol of female genius, whose wings were clipped by the phallic blades of insecure men.

  Her stories—some of them striking—are, yes, Fitzgeraldian and on occasion were even published under Fitzgerald’s signature in order to earn better pay. And her novel Save Me the Waltz (1934) can be read as a kind of ghost sister to Tender Is the Night with moments that recall—as if taking place in a dollhouse of hypnotized dolls—both the films of Wes Anderson and those of Paul Thomas Anderson.

  Save Me the Waltz is, of course, a somewhat terrifying book. But it’s also a very pleasant book, as long as it doesn’t come to live with you after the dance has ended.

  Save Me the Waltz is a book by and like Zelda Fitzgerald.

  Save Me the Waltz—written in three days to the despair and wonder of the increasingly slow and blocked Fitzgerald—is a book by a woman who is convinced that the flowers are talking to her, who spends more than nine hours in front of a mirror attempting a desperate pas de une and to look as much like a ballerina as possible, but who ends up a sort of distant cousin of the first wife of Edward Fairfa
x Rochester and close personal friend of Miss Havisham.

  And, true, the delirium of Penelope fleeing Mount Karma does indeed resemble the desert and African deliriums of Zelda, believing herself lost on wild savannahs, wandering like an explorer sans compass, and composing letters that read: “Dear: dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear . . .” and on and on for pages.

  And he takes advantage of Zelda’s madness and he invents her a novella, “Wuthering Heights Revisited,” recently discovered among papers deposited in American universities, places where things are always being discovered whose existence was previously unknown; where the dead seem to keep on writing, as if they didn’t know, or hadn’t been notified, that they were dead; that they don’t need to keep telling their stories, that their stories will now be told by the living.

  † “Wuthering Heights Revisited” tells the story of a beautiful and romantic young woman who, obsessed with gothic novels, marries a rich yet bohemian heir who has come to Europe to find success as an artist. Her husband falls seriously ill and both of them return to his family’s home, on the other side of the ocean. There, the young woman suffers and, discovering that she is pregnant, runs away without saying anything to her in-laws out of fear that they won’t let her leave and will claim her child for the heir. The young woman, without a home, lives with her brother. The boy is born and the young mother, sensing that she’s going mad, discovers not only that the boy won’t ever love her, but that in addition, as the years go by, he’ll love her brother more and more. One night, the young woman takes her son for a walk along a beach that leads into a forest. And the young woman comes home alone and smiling. And she says she doesn’t know what happened, that she doesn’t remember anything, that she was “possessed by the ugliest of all the Ugly Spirits,” and, when questioned about the boy, she sings and sings and doesn’t stop singing.

  “Dear: dear, dear, dear . . .”

  † Long process of deterioration. Even longer. That’s enough.