The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  So, after that, this time he’d promised not to drink anything. Or just one vodka-tonic. And to behave. And to peruse all the book stalls not thinking about all the books he was going to read, but about the ones he’d never read. And it wouldn’t be a bad way to distract himself—a condemned man’s last walk—before the next day’s endeavor, before doing what he’d come to do. And there were always a couple friends at these fairs (more “acquaintances” and fewer “friends” all the time) whom it was worth seeing again just to convince himself that he hadn’t, yet, turned into the most extreme and sympathetic of misanthropes. And every so often he experienced an uncertain curiosity about the people (not necessarily readers) who still had a certain curiosity about writers. Hadn’t they read that thing about “this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist . . . what is it? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work” (William Gaddis)? Didn’t they understand that thing about “The artist must manage to make posterity believe he never existed” (Gustave Flaubert)? No and no. And not only had readers not understood it. The majority of writers hadn’t either. For some strange reason, everything seemed to indicate that the craft continued to produce some intrigue and generate some mystery. So, readers came to see writers up close without realizing that the writers were looking at them too. The fast but oh so slow readers asking with wide eyes, like children whose parents just finished reading a story that they know to be impossible but wish were true, simple and innocent things like “Is that real? Did that happen? What’s the invented part and what’s the true part?” And the slow but oh so fast writers (who could’ve devoted months to achieving the perfect balance in a single sentence they’d never be asked about) answering by stating the obvious, politely skirting the issue, or, in his case, even responding with absurdities like “I can’t answer that because they’ve kidnapped my grandmother and if I tell you . . .”; or precise things like “If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions. If there were no questions, there would be no lies” (Bruno Traven); or countering with another question, with one of those jokes about surrealists that he liked so much, like, for example, how many surrealists does it take to tell a surrealist joke that asks how many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? The eyes of the ones meeting the eyes of the others as if they were staring at fantastical mythological beasts in an ancient bestiary, or at one of those sad animals in any modern zoo. Maybe, who knows, they’re drawn—the ones to the others—by the childish notion of finding out what the trick is. Or maybe it was a residual effect of the bad influence of all those bad movies with actors of varying quality always, badly, playing writers. Playing writers who seem to feel the obligation to be good characters when the truth is something else and the best movies with/about writers (think of Smoke, Providence, La Dolce Vita, Barton Fink, 2046, The Door in the Floor) portray them as seriously miserable creatures and so neurotic that all they want to do is forget. Or to be allowed to forget, at least for a while, that they’re nothing more than writers. Even the most adolescent, restless, and romantic of the lot (the ones in the Antoine Doinel series or Betty Blue, or the Dashiell Hammett in Julia, who’s nothing more than the juvenile fantasy of an autumn writer with a house by the sea and a younger woman who throws his typewriter out the window because, ah, she’s oh so impulsive and passionate) were imbued with a sadness and a sordidness capable of making him feel embarrassed, not because he lived like that, but because it was assumed by everyone else that he must live like that—because he was a writer, right? Same old story: running after unstable muses through the streets of Paris at the speed of clichés and catching them in beds, many letters from heartless editors, but then that one phone call that changes everything because it tells you you’re a genius, and you retire to a house by the sea, and even have a talking cat that encourages you to keep on writing. Or maybe what seduced readers and writers when mutually contemplating one another was the mutual transfer of energy, like a never-ending circuit: readers thinking “I could be like that too if I tried, because I’ve got so many stories to tell,” and writers thinking “Ah, it’d be so much easier to just have to read.”

  Thus, also, the expectation of the organizers of these events and a sort of perfume of stadium dressing room leading up to the thing: an almost reflexive air of cordial but implacable competition in the secret sport of which writer will emerge as the funniest, most intriguing, ingenious, transgressive, kind, wise, crazy, etcetera. In other words: the most writerly writer of all the writers at the event. And, to tell the truth, there were nights when even he played along; when he tried not to disappoint; when he did his best to more or less live up to the illusions of all those who wanted to believe that a writer was someone worth seeing and listening to.

  But it all went wrong. The audience—not too big—seemed composed exclusively of fans of technology and code writers, generally interested in searching for and discovering the formula for the application that’d make them the envy of their peers and young millionaires to boot. Some of them, not many to tell the truth, he wasn’t even good for that, recorded him on their phones/screens, held up at the height of their eyes—to him, from his seat, they glowed like those photos where black strips are superimposed across faces to render them unrecognizable—and, of course, they’d send it to their friends via email with the Subject: “poor guy.” Nobody laughed at any of his jokes. (OK: that joke about the possibility that it was the passengers’ fault that the airplanes crashed on September 11th, 2001, because they started to call their family members from their mobile phones, interfering with the instrumentation, turning simple hijackers into kamikazes, could be considered a little risqué.) They didn’t even notice his increasingly odd diction: like that of the voice that, so long ago, you’d ask for the time and it’d respond word by word and number by number until it put together, in pieces, the sentence and the information. A voice like the notes sent by kidnappers composed of words cut out from newspapers and magazines, with varying typography—spasms of prose. The dark auditorium, the audience like a liquid and shadowy and dense mass broken only—as if they were the notes of a secret and concrete and silent and caged score, like something by John Cage—by the intermittent lights of small screens, illuminating here and there an ectoplasmic face, tapping messages on a touchpad, more than three taps, describing what they’re seeing but without watching or paying attention to it. And, some of them, of course, request the microphone to ask questions or talk about their own lives. And he told them that he wasn’t going to answer them because “my parents always told me not to talk to strangers and ha ha ha.” Which caused him to laugh, there, live, and the uncomfortable and humiliating sensation and misunderstanding for everyone else that, yes, he was laughing at his own jokes so they (the jokes) wouldn’t feel sad and alone. And then he felt very sad and very alone even though he had many colleagues up there on the stage. Too many. People he had nothing to do with or people who he didn’t even want to see. Either way, it was all the same. They probably weren’t that enthused to have him sitting next to them either, with that air of Ghost of Christmas past, reminding them about something they’d managed to almost completely forget, about writing things that weren’t limited to just recounting something, but that, in addition, counted for something. And now, here they were, all together yet, always, so separate. An author of conspiratorial bestsellers that roused great applause from the audience when he confessed that he was in permanent contact with his readers via his numerous social media profiles, and he even used them to find out if it seemed like a good idea that he include “something Aztec” in his next book. A combative feminist writer best known for her newspaper column where every summer she recalled her childhood vacation to a little town on the coast. A “serious” author of illegible books who, faced with such technological abandon, released a grunt about how “I still write like a caveman by the light of the fire” (and he wanted to point out,
but restrained himself, that cavemen were several thousands of years away from illuminating anything resembling an alphabet). A very popular writer of “costumbrist detective fiction.” A manufacturer of young adult romantic fantasies with titles like If You Ask Me If I Love You I Ask You That Please Before I Answer Let Me Consult My Compass and My Parents and My Psychoanalyst Because You Know How I Am into These Things of the Heart and Do You by Chance Know What Metro Station I Have to Get Off to Go To . . . or something like that. And, unscheduled and as a great and much celebrated surprise for and by all the attendees, IKEA. His Horror, The Horror. His Hamlet, revenge. His MAYDAY MAYDAY. His DEFCON 1. His dark prince. His Frankenstein’s monster. There are dark and soulless nights when he comes to think that IKEA doesn’t exist; that IKEA is nothing more than a toxic product of his imagination. IKEA, like an entity that all writers put up with and drag around throughout their lives and careers. One of those monstrous doubles that narrate or are narrated and that lie in wait for poor fools in Stephen King novels or in stories like “The Private Life” by Henry James: the heartless version and the merciless alternative of what he—he recognizes it just a few lines later—could have been but never was and never will be. Not because—as he deceived himself—he wouldn’t be interested in being like that, but because he never thought he’d get there. Something that was merely the embodiment of the diurnal and vespertine and nocturnal emission—a replica and faithful doppelgänger—of the winter of his discontent.

  IKEA had been born twenty years after him, in the same country, but already in a different world. IKEA, once, a while back but not too long ago, had approached him with that more frightening than frightened zeal of a disciple (it hadn’t taken him long to realize that IKEA was a kind of professional approacher, that his “maestros” numbered in the dozens, and to fall into that category, you just had to appear on his radar screen and position yourself at a praiseworthy distance) and had professed his admiration and asked him to read a couple of his stories that he’d published in anthologies. “Shy but sincere homages to your genius,” he called them. And he read them, because he was moved by the fact that, before sending them, he’d asked permission. And, yes, he discovered in them obvious winks and barely subliminal praise of his work. And the truth is, they weren’t all that bad and actually quite good. And he even showed them to his editor. (IKEA, who was more familiar with stories about writers than with the work of those writers, exclaimed: “Like Fitzgerald for Hemingway!” And he didn’t realize then what IKEA was trying to say, but he knows it now, remembering the way Hemingway mistreated Fitzgerald until the last days of their respective lives. He remembers that Fitzgerald was the one who cracked up and Hemingway the one who shot himself, that both killed themselves, one with the authority of failure and the other with the authority of success. But he also knows that IKEA campaigns against the domestic use of firearms while he has less and less trouble with drinking alcohol, so . . .) And, yes, before, in the beginning, the truth is that the kid made him feel a kind of begrudging tenderness: what you feel confronting some, theoretically, defenseless and small and fragile thing, like those presumably helpless fish that suddenly bristle and, grinning, inject you with lethal venom. He didn’t know it then (when, with a combination of generosity and narcissism, he mentioned IKEA’s name in an interview as a future great, thinking that he was inviting him to be a footnote in his own story and not, as seems to be the case, the other way around), but he knows it now. IKEA was a virus, something designed in a secret laboratory, the next Official Great Writer and All Powerful Emperor of the Galaxy. Someone whose sole objective was to become a celebrity writer and, to achieve this, he was prepared even to write. To write books that were perfect not in their quality and ingenuity but in their potential contagiousness and all-terrain functionality. To write as if over underscores or connecting dots with lines until he attained—like in those paintings with numbered zones where each number corresponds to a predetermined color—an instantly recognizable design. An air of prefab classic. IKEA (the nickname that he’d given him and with which he’d linked him to that brand of functional and economical furniture, with falsely complex instructions, and models with sophisticated and difficult-to-pronounce names but that speak in a decorative Esperanto that make them fit in so impersonally well in every case and on every occasion) had it all figured out. IKEA knew perfectly what steps to take to assemble a successful and comfortable model of himself. It didn’t take IKEA long to proclaim himself first the leader of a generation (while he decapitated his subjects one by one) and then proceed to weave a perfectly calculated web of awards and relationships that he complemented with solemn titles and perfect storylines for his large, anxious-to-feel-sophisticated audience. Laterally and in the shadows circulated the cybernetic-urban legend that IKEA had, also, started various blogs under different aliases to celebrate himself and to ruin the celebrations of others. Some people went even further explaining his success, which laid waste to everything and prevented anything from growing in its wake: IKEA could only be backed by other capital letters, by the CIA or something like that. Whatever it might be and whatever it might have been, all in the name of a comfortable and soft literature to sit on top of and be happy to have something to belong to. Books with a credit card. Books to be named that recalled other big-name books, not plagiarisms exactly but distorted echoes of celebrated voices, classic and watered-down perfumes in alluring modern bottles, new and catchy arrangements of a melody that used to be subtle chamber music and now plays in a supercharged elevator that only knows how to climb. Clawing his way up and in short order, IKEA had managed to become part of the squad of that kind of respectable author (some of them much better than others, but all of them, in the end, flying over the same civilian targets and anxious to receive new doses of the same drug) who sell well, not due to pure intelligence, but to something cunning and impure: because they make readers feel smarter than they actually are. Illusionists for the deluded, settling for a mix of more or less high brow, allusions to classics, a little sex (always with the lights off and in penthouses), politico-historical details, and a sentimental and melodramatic plot where everyone, in the end, finds themselves changed for the better, watching the sun come up in a dangerous but beloved city. IKEA, for a while, was the youngest writer to ever occupy a seat in the great academy of the language: a new seat with the letter @ had been created especially for him. And he lived in a Brooklyn loft (with an actress/model and a young son who was already famous for being the public image of an app for teaching infants to say their first word) that’d been ceded to him in perpetuity by a gay Italian aristocrat whom he duly thanked on the last page of all his books. The actress/model—to whom IKEA was systematically unfaithful, because “more than a hundred kilometers away from home it’s not cheating and I travel a lot, ha ha ha”—is his second wife. Nobody remembers who the first one was.

  IKEA was the light and destiny and example to follow for an entire generation of young writers who, always, seemed to him like they were fascinated with their own voracity, starving to capture followers and likes with an insatiable appetite that made them want to bite everything first and wonder about its taste later. Like the fantastical and mixed animals—half Pekinese and half Parana, more ferocious lambs than ferocious wolves—in those musty monastery bestiaries. The important thing, it seemed, was to leave nothing for anybody else, nothing for nobody. Just in case. All for one and none for all. Formed and deformed at the dawn of blogs and in the tangle of webs, all of them—in their own name or under an alias—had turned into expert courtiers and conspirators, uniting and dividing in fragile and ephemeral generations. Many of them hadn’t read Shakespeare (the past, neither the remotest nor most recent, didn’t interest them at all), but they were experts in the immemorial art of the palace and castle vaudeville. Or oh so gifted and muscular at the barroom insult and vomiting in the alleyway, always sheltering themselves by claiming that it was all freedom of expression and that everyone who purchased a scree
n had the right to be a writer and that literature was democratic not knowing, poor innocent babies, that literature was a dictatorship, an eternal dictatorship, and even worse—literature was a dictatorship of the self. There they all were, ignorant, typing their venom. And not satisfied with that—with throwing invisible and solipsistic darts, with denying the existence of the previous generation because they were anterior to the iPhone or some economic crisis—they made a jump to the physical plane, turning themselves into showmen and showgirls putting on live performances as writers. Presenting themselves as characters, easy to identify by their abilities, casting themselves as expert players of a part that left out all the stage fright of the blank page. Now, to be a writer, you had to sing and dance and act, too. Occupy spaces. Diversify. Be legion.