The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Running into them at those circuses for gladiators and clowns, the increasingly abundant festivals (to which he, as mentioned, went for the money and because, according to his publisher, “he had to let himself be seen sometimes so people knew he was still there”), he was always impressed by their blind ambition, their capacity for strategy, where what they wrote seemed more secondary than central: never a destructive boulder or a rocket to discover new worlds but, merely, a catapult or a launch tower. The ephemeral work was nothing more than the site from which to ascend to everlasting life. Once, in a conference of young writers where he’d been invited as an ex-young writer, several of them had laughed in his face (that kind of laugh the goes “Hua-hua”) and almost spat at him, “That’s your problem and not ours, not our generation’s” when he’d had the audacity to admit that he was interested in writing a great book, that that was his project and his pleasure. And—what seemed so strange to him—they didn’t even really like books: their personal libraries were fairly obvious and meager (all of them had embraced the lightning arrival of electronic books as a perfect excuse to not present physical evidence of reading) and he’d watched them go into bookstores many times without any curiosity or anticipation, without moving a single hair except the invisible and hypersensitive tentacles they used to detect the good or bad placement of their own books on tables and stands and shelves. And, watching them with a combination of shock and admiration and nausea, he couldn’t help but remember himself, still unpublished, breathing deeply the perfume of foreign libraries, touching and caressing and setting up that golden moment when he’d be handed the first copy of his first book as his most supreme and sublime fantasy. And the walk home, with the book in his hand. And the perfect instant of putting it in a shelf, alongside so many others. That was it for him; he couldn’t see anything beyond that. That was enough and more than enough to achieve ecstasy. The rest—what would come later—would be, in every case, not something to look for, but something that comes looking for you.

  Now, not so much: now, freshly-minted writers were like marines ready to storm a beach, ready to beat back the enemy, and, in the clamor of the landing and the taking of their positions in the rankings, without a care for collateral damage or the effects of friendly fire on their colleagues, and the danger of thinking about this and about them is that his thoughts on the subject tirelessly repeated with minimal variations a principal theme of fear and rage. And nobody caused him more fear and rage than IKEA. And here he comes again.

  IKEA—who didn’t waste time with masturbatory literary workshops and began as a precocious junior executive in an advertising agency, where he composed slogans that seemed an awful lot like his current catchy and sappy aphorisms—had been most astute, opting for a classic role, not so attractive at the outset but much more effective by the half-way point: the young but “serious” writer who is also exceedingly fun and witty. A kind of clone/ bonsai who was—erroneously—presumed to be perfectly under control and a lot like his idols who, close to death, didn’t hesitate to give him a pat on the back. As if guaranteeing a medium for their own posterity while at the same time successfully invoking the ghost of their successful yet increasingly distant youths, when literature still provoked true curiosity, true marks of prestige. IKEA, perpetual puppy dog, letting all of them stroke his head, first going down on his knees, but in private—he’d witnessed it, he’d laughed a great deal—doing savage impressions of those very same gurus, with a sharp wit and capacity for observation that left you trembling just imagining the impression of you that, without a doubt, IKEA did when you weren’t present. Those impressions (the one of Marcelo Chiriboga was truly memorable) were, from a distance, IKEA’s best work in the realm of literature, he thought. And there was something disturbing, he thought, in the fact that, maybe just in front of him and in the corners at parties, IKEA wouldn’t hesitate to expose his dark side—the portrait rotting in the attic of his malice. Because it (what at first he understood as a display of honesty and trust in the name of their long shared history) was actually something far more sinister: IKEA actually considered him a kind of special cesspit where he purged his sewage every so often. Besides, who would believe him if he told them even a fraction of everything IKEA confessed to him at a mass filled more with laughter than prayer, in a low conspiratorial voice. No doubt, they’d say he was jealous. And, yes, he was jealous of IKEA. Not of his work but of what he’d achieved with it.

  IKEA’s latest great success was titled Landscape with Hollow Men (don’t miss, please, the equally obvious and clever allusion to Eliot, hierarchizing everything right from the cover) and it was a robust family/intercontinental saga that recounted the trials and tribulations of Benavídez: a republican grandfather who fled Spain, crossing the Atlantic dressed as a woman (and found success as a singer of transsexual folksongs in the cabarets of Rio de la Plata); his son, who ends up being a grand master torturer for a Latin American dictatorship in a country called Aracatina (participating in the capture and assassination of Che Guevara and in the Six Day War, where he meets the beautiful and explosive Judith); his grandson, who is programmed as messianic magnate, designing bellicose role-player videogames in a kind of Xanadu in Silicon Valley; and his great grandson who finds success as a young singer for inflamed adolescents. The novel ended, of course, with the singer tired of singing “Text Me Your Heart” or “Twitter Twist,” and—after surviving an attack by an Islamic-fundamentalist where his recording partner Chicka Chikita is killed—renouncing everything to return to his great grandfather’s ranch and found an agricultural cooperative in times of economic crisis and become, at last, the avatar of the New Man. Landscape with Hollow Men had just been acquired by HBO (there were, also, film offers; but IKEA was one of those people convinced that “if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d write for HBO”), selected for Oprah’s Book Club (“A book of Latin American origin for the first and only and last time,” the proprietess of the business had smiled), Justin Beiber was being considered for the role of the singer and Daniel Day-Lewis for the tech genius, and De Niro and Pacino were reuniting to play father and son, digitalized (“Not like in The Godfather II, but for real”) to look young, or something like that. But he wouldn’t miss seeing it and following it. It was already carefully outlined, scene-by-scene, in the book, which he’d taken a peek at, on the sly, hiding behind it, so that nobody would see him reading it.

  And, at the roundtable, everything that IKEA said (which he could anticipate, with ease, as if he were reading his mind five seconds before it formulated its simple thoughts, and if his calculations were correct it was the third time he’d heard him say “The important thing is not that the story passes through the characters but that the characters pass through History”) was received with shouts and hurrahs worthy of those frenzied Russian casino officials at the beginning of Anna Karenina, while all he could think about was running out of there and throwing himself under the wheels of the first passing train.

  Because worst of all was that—without the makeup of that laughter that he was sure he could rely on until that night—everything he said was, also, equally stupid and superficial. Suddenly it dawned on him that his own contribution was just like IKEA’s; just that it was less successful and more boring and pretentious and sad. Even worse, everything he said barely concealed the always uncomfortable and repugnant tone of a lament.

  Things that occurred or occurred to him in airports.

  Things like: “First of all: the following aren’t categorical universal truths. They are, merely, debatable personal opinions. I’ve said it many times, I’ll say it again. From the dust we come and to the dust we return. And, a while back I read—in a book, of course—that 90 percent of the dust in a house is composed of residue shed by human beings. And, in who knows what other book, I read that dust is good for books, that it keeps them young, that it’s not good to dust them too often. Thus, we unmake ourselves so our books won’t be unmade. To me this seems prosaically and poeticall
y just.”

  Or: “These days I go to bed very early, and before the sweet dreams come, I frequently confront the bitter possibility of insomnia to be exorcised and defeated. The other night, for example, I wondered if everything that’s happening might not have to do with the fact that the reader animal has reached its evolutionary zenith and is now bouncing off the cupola and limit of its perfection and coming down in reverse toward a kind of involution disguised as a high-tech mutation. We are oh so futuristic we don’t even realize that—as far as this whole thing goes—we’re barely in the prehistory of prehistory. In its moment, the jump from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century was much more futuristic—the climax and multiple orgasms of the industrial revolution. The electricity of bodies and the blood of machines rolling in the damp sheets of History and there was still so long before the arrival of that third party in discord and automatic loving energy. Now, on the other hand, we tremble in the most masturbatory of prologues and previews. We’re frigid invertebrate and submarine gelatin, dreaming of a skeleton on terra firma. Because, think about it, it hasn’t been easy to get here, traversing the long road that goes from stardust to the amphibious amoeba, to the upright simian, up to obtaining the ability and talent to enjoy one of the most wondrously complex tasks that, for me, remains inexplicable: making a handful of symbols enter through our eyes, arrive to our brain and, there, turn into stories and into people and into worlds, always distinct, always constructed in complicity with their architects. It’s writers who sketch the blueprint, but we are the ones who utilize, like Proust said, that ‘optical instrument’ that allows us to discern what, without that book, we might never have seen inside ourselves.”

  Or: “E-readers, supposedly, help to facilitate and accelerate the reading experience, but actually, it seems, end up removing the desire to continue reading. But—breaking ancient news, stop the presses—we still read at the same speed as Aristotle. About four hundred fifty words a minute. So, all that external electric velocity at our disposal ends up colliding with our more deliberate internal electricity. In other words: machines are faster and faster; but we are not. We haven’t gained much and, along the way, we’ve lost the exquisite pleasure of leisure, which is how and where the stuff of hopes and dreams is made. We live and create, determined to increase our machines’ capacity to store a number of books that we’ll never be able to read. We are truly fascinated and falsely proud of the fact that we can bring all of it with us, of having access to everything, without stopping to think that in the selection and the sacrifice, in what is chosen and what is discarded, resides the formation of taste and personality. Reading a little of everything is like not seeing anything or running through a burning museum. Looked at like this, it seems to me that the paper book is nearer our rhythm (there are nights when I deeply envy the environment of the nineteenth century when it comes to reading nineteenth-century novels by candlelight) and, please, is there anyone in the room who can explain what’s so great about being able to read and record and watch on a telephone and why it is that telephones have evolved so much in recent years and airplanes so little, eh?”

  Or: “We live in one of those grinding, pneumatic hinge moments. The door that closes with a groan, the same door that then opens with a whisper of optical cells. Complex times . . . I know writers who could care less and writers who can’t stop making little avant-garde leaps, trying to patent a brand that’ll make them famous not for fifteen minutes but for one hundred forty characters on screens and pages with, if possible, little photos and drawings and typographical games (and, yes, let the bastard italicizer who’s without sin cast the first italic, I too once played with the idea of different types of text to indicate voices on the telephone or to make atomized voices float through the air). I know publishers who are excited by a new genesis so many years after Gutenberg and publishers who are depressed because it’s fallen on them to face the apocalypse; I know readers who don’t read, but who are proud of being able to store up to two thousand titles in their backpacks and readers who have read two thousand books and tremble with fear thinking about their next inevitable move. ‘I have seen the best minds of my generation looking but not seeing . . .’ Remember: there was a time when everyone got together after vacation to update each other; there was a time, also, when looking at friends’ vacation photos was torture. But it was a milder torture: because—before the arrival of the digital, during the age of film developing—you at least had to think it over and do a little focusing before firing off each shot. Ration them out somewhat rationally. Think before you click. Now, not so much. Now, everything, all the time, ceaselessly, over and over and over again. Everything is transcendent and the transcendent turns banal in its excess and overload. Not even the clean and increasingly distant pain of breaking up remains, because: can anyone resist the temptation to find out what their ex is doing, after they’ve broken up, in a new era, on Facebook, whose use, they say, releases “the same hormone as kissing and hugging” and promotes “platonic infidelity”? Or, even worse, is there anyone who can resist the simple horror of searching for and finding someone they haven’t seen for decades in a matter of seconds and verifying in their eyes—surprised or possibly happy or definitely scared to see us, oh so FaceTime—the heavy and militant passing of time; marching with those spike-soled boots hammering that almost unrecognizable face that, forced to learn it and update it, reminds us that the only reason we recognize that face as it is now is because it refuses to come unfixed, like a carnivorous mask, from the face that it once was but that we can’t forget because of our best bad memories? And where have all those impassioned discussions about who directed that film and who sang in that band gone to die? Now, it seems, there’s nothing more attractive or interesting—the tweet like a projector slide—than knowing what people who are more or less strangers are doing every five minutes in one hundred forty characters, including—to the joy of burglars—the news that they’re leaving on a trip or that the key is under the third pot from the door counting from the left. The phenomenon already has a label: “oversharing,” overdose of exhibition of the private, be it contractions or snores or heartbeats or the absence of all the above, and in whose name we narrate a birth as it happens, or get bored during a nap, or confess to a murder in person, and we can even pay a specialized service to keep our lives updated for years after our deaths so that we’re not missed. Being missed has gone missing. Being familiar with so much doesn’t mean knowing more. There was a time when the definitive proof of success was the very ability to disappear, to be impossible to find, to have nobody know where you are. To be unreachable. To be outside everything. Now, if you’re a true celebrity, you have to have billions of followers and give an account of your most recent and more or less transcendent act. Total irony: the guy who uploaded his own spectacular fall in the street onto YouTube (because he was checking his profile when he should’ve been looking at what was in front of him) to the hilarity of entire populations will realize pretty quickly that nobody recognizes him on the street. He’s not famous. He’s something else. He’s just a moment, whose name and before and after don’t matter. He’s not even, Warholianly, famous for fifteen minutes. His thing doesn’t last or hold out nearly that long. We’re all our own candid cameras now. We’re blooper-looper machines. We’re mutants and I’ve heard that, in Japan, land of mutations, the structure and shape of the youngest users’ thumbs have already been altered from constantly touching small screens. And it must be sad to die so young or to be broken so suddenly; I see them and I dodge them—stopping in doorways, on platforms, at edges of stairways—pausing to update their profiles and check those of others and, ah, see how they fall. Precipitating like silly events from those moments that not long ago—when the vital idea of blood hadn’t yet been supplanted by electronic embalming fluid—were the exact spot, the place where anything was possible and where all great and unexpected ideas came from. Times when we allowed ourselves the luxury of getting distracted, of th
inking of things that weren’t ourselves or what others think of us. Here comes another one, from on high, an evolutionary down-cycle. And I wonder if there might not already exist a statistical index for accidental death by electronic device. Probably. But it won’t be made public, just like how for decades we weren’t told that smoking could be detrimental to our health. There they go, there they are. And I don’t know which theory to believe of all those that prophesy various ends of humanity. But there’s one—which hasn’t yet been formulated—that I’m almost certain of: human beings will disappear because they’ll be too busy answering messages, updating profiles, falling on their faces from platforms onto the tracks of trains conducted by engineers talking to their girlfriends on FaceTime to procreate and multiply. All aboard.”