The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  After the roundtable, everyone stood up and he was served a reddish cocktail with some canapés that weren’t bad (which was to be appreciated and increasingly surprising; the way things were going, pretty soon they’d be asking the writers to bring a little food from home to share with the audience). And he, as was his habit, initiated the operation of slipping back to his nearby hotel, stopping off at a bookstore along the way to see if Arthur C. Clark, though dead, had figured out a way to transmit a new sequel to 2001 from the far reaches of the universe, some answer and/or advice/remedy from Dr. Heywood Floyd, responding to his calls for help. Or to see if they were selling the new techno-thriller that he’d read about and that seemed right up his alley: the paranoid idea that mobile phones were the only candy of technological evolution thrown to the masses, to keep them distracted and dumbed down in a new Middle Ages, while a chosen minority benefited from everything else (revolutionary medicines, modes of teletransport, ways to stay young forever, servile robots that never rebel), enjoying a future that’d already arrived years before. Yes, he read these things just like he did when he was a kid, to travel, to escape, to go far away, further still, until the distance made his eyes grow heavy. And after, sinking into the opiate stupor of the latest popular reality show while gargling with purple Listerine Total Care. Something with a handful of celebrities, famous for all the wrong reasons, stuck in a maximum-security prison, living alongside serial killers and Mafioso politicians and old men who’d thrown their wives out of windows. Anything to distract him from the little bottles in the minibar (he’d discovered quite late but with growing enthusiasm that those liquors were not an exit ramp, but a perfect spot along the side of the road to stop for a while and watch newer and faster cars whose passing drivers shouted things at him he couldn’t decipher and launched into fits of laughter). Something to help him ignore for a while the approaching certainty (like of those numbered signs alongside highways, counting down, informing you that there are fewer and fewer kilometers until you run out of gas or crash) that he was now living and writing in a world where medium had triumphed over rare and well-done. Where all that mattered were the aerodynamic highways that you had to pay excessive tolls to circulate on and nobody was interested in venturing off on side roads with picturesque motels and restaurants with homemade food where, once again, circularly, every so often, he sat and watched them pass by and waved to them with one hand or one finger, depending on the mood he found or lost himself in.

  He was hungry, he bit into everything put to hand and mouth; but at the same time he felt the need to get out of there. Right away. Now. Immediately. And that’s exactly what he was doing, already nearing the exit of that other claustrophobic reality show of writers and readers and editors, when IKEA took him by the arm as if he were something that belonged to him but that he almost never played with anymore, like the more or less noble relic of a past that he wasn’t much interested in remembering except to say “It already happened.”

  The last time he’d seen IKEA he’d confirmed, with satisfaction, that IKEA was going bald. But, now, suddenly, not so much—he was flaunting a thick leonine mane the color of spilled oil. It was so impressive that he couldn’t help but acknowledge it. “I know, I know . . . But don’t say anything. You can’t—it’s illegal. Baby panda-bear glands. A small fortune on the black market. You know why there are so few pandas? Because they only breed three days a year. So, I guess all that sexual repression must stimulate capillary growth. And so one day my agent and I were looking through photos, and we saw that the odds of a writer without hair winning the Nobel are between 55 and 60 percent lower than those of a writer with hair. And bald writers are victims of the worst injustices. Your dear Nabokov . . . Your adored James . . .” IKEA’s literary agent—after having betrayed the selfless older woman who, with patience and near exclusive devotion, had launched his career and who, according to the rumor, had tried to commit suicide after being abandoned by the person she considered “more than a son: the son I would’ve chosen if one were able to choose the son one wants to have”—was now the internationally famous and feared Dirty Harry. They called him that because his name was Harry.

  IKEA, à la Superman, carefully and sublimely brushed a lock of hair from his forehead and (with an accent that wasn’t of anywhere anymore but of everywhere, an international accent, an accent with innumerable translations and publishers) said something like “Here you are, my friend. I loved your new book, I didn’t really understand it, but of course it’s really good, right?” And the problem for him wasn’t what IKEA said, but how he said it: with a falsely guilty manner and seemingly apologizing for his lack of intellectual ability but, at the same time, with the rusty knife of a slight smile that could only mean, “You’re out; those positive reviews don’t matter anymore, now that nobody reads your books. Another one bites the dust and thanks for everything.” Next, IKEA fired up his weapon of mass destruction: “I hear you just finished a book . . . It’d be an honor to present it.” And he, slow of reflexes, fell right into the trap and, almost automatically but aware of the error he was making, an error from which there was no coming back, answered: “No. I don’t have a book coming out.” Then IKEA looked at him sadly, gave him a little pat on the back, and said, “Ah, too bad. I must’ve been misinformed. No book then . . . Too bad. Then, I’ll take this opportunity to give you some far more useful advice than the advice you once gave me, ha. No, seriously, listen: enough already with these books about writers, books about writing. Nobody’s interested in literature, beginning with the majority of readers, man. And writers are only interested in their own writing and, at most, to seem impressive, the writing of some distant dead man whom they latch onto as if they’d known him all their lives. Normal people just want to pass time and feel represented. Haven’t you ever read the comments on Amazon condemning a book with the worst possible rating? No? Read them and you’ll see. The reason is always the same: ‘I didn’t identify with any of the characters’ or ‘There wasn’t a single character worth getting to know.’ Why do you think all my books have the characters’ faces on the covers? I know, you already told me that you don’t like that, that, to you, it seems like a dictatorial editorial imposition on the democracy of literature and the privilege of each reader to define the features of the book’s heroes and villains, so the book is theirs and only theirs and unique and all those things you like to say in public because you believe them in private. But, once again, you’re wrong: readers are not free organisms. Just the opposite: readers want to be captivated and guided like the blind in the night. The faces on the covers of my books are carefully selected by a software program: they’re like the faces of actors and celebrities, but not exactly; and statistically common ethnic details of the countries where the books are published get inserted. Like I already said: being able to identify, to recognize themselves. Make them feel like it’s a book they could someday write. Make them feel like coauthors. That’s the secret. And anything is better—even the worst of the worst—than getting to know or identifying with a writer with writer problems. Le mot juste? It doesn’t exist. That’s why—to address that problem—synonyms were invented. And people get nervous if, when they read, they discover that writing is hard. It’s hard for them to read that. What’re they looking for? What do they want to find? Easy: readers in the third world want someone to create a fiction out of the dreadful reality that bad luck has dealt them. Something that makes them feel, at least, justified and that they’re suffering for a good cause—my cause. If through their misery I find success, they feel that my success is somewhat their own. While readers in the first world, reading that onslaught of horrors, are grateful that they see all that shit only at a distance, in a novel, and buying it helps them feel politically correct so they can comment on it and be hip and move on to something else. It’s like the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. You know: once a year, they give out a little gold statue to the story of a young shepherdess, raped by her father in Kazakhstan. Two hou
rs of remote horror and then back to business as usual—superheroes and comedies with a witty girl. Didn’t you get kidnapped when you were a kid? Didn’t your parents disappear? Or were they saved? Wasn’t that a story in your first book? Didn’t that book do well? But you only dedicated one story to that . . . What a waste, man: with something like that I would’ve made an eight-hundred-page party.” And, getting warmed up now, he continued: “And also, enough with your referential mania and stop with your enumerations and lists and going around pointing out and acknowledging each and every one of your sources and debts and allusions. This display of honesty is in bad taste and it makes you look like the combination of an old man of the nouveau riche and a little orphan of literature. The worst of both worlds. And no one expects or asks you for that display of honesty. We all steal things, nobody admits it, and we don’t like that you go around reminding us of our little sins. After all: aren’t you a big fan of Bob Dylan, who’s something like the King of the Magpies? Don’t you come from a glorious literary tradition of brilliant appropriators? And while you’re at it: quit repeating that thing about the one hundred forty characters of Twitter. That’s not how it works. Not exactly. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand and, even worse, don’t get pissed about what you don’t know. Relax, man.” And then IKEA—with false sadness and authentic joy—concludes the performance with a, “Who would’ve thought: you’ve totally become a writer’s writer, a true cult writer. I’m jealous. You’ve got no idea how much I’d like a little solitude so I could devote myself to doing my thing without distractions . . . But to each his own, man.” And—with his eternal and indiscriminate smile, mouth full of fangs, light beard seemingly aerographed onto his face—IKEA went to greet a Pulitzer Prize winner from whom he’d managed to extract the vacuous yet substantive bubbles of a blurb for the forthcoming U.S. edition of Landscape with Hollow Men. And he stayed there, upright but bowled over, wishing on him all the biblical plagues (including the death of his hardworking firstborn) and thinking that if you stare with squinted eyes at the expression “writer’s writer,” what you read below, like almost subliminal subtitles, is the translation: “A writer’s writer is the writer to whom other writers pray because, like a martyr waiting, with any luck, for posthumous canonization, it’s that kind of better writer for whom things go badly so that things can go better for worse writers.”

  Or something like that.

  Really, he didn’t know what he was and where he fit: for some he was commercial, for others he was experimental, for the majority he was hard to classify. And what’s hard to classify was better to ignore. Because things that are complicated to define and delimit always cause a ruckus among cold academics and cool hunters alike. And some and others and the majority agreed that there were too many writers in his books (the most belligerent mocked that fact by pointing out that “those books could only have been written by someone born—born dead besides—the same date that Jane Austen died and Mein Kampf was published”). And that his vision of the profession was somewhere between romantic and childish (somebody had told him once that all his writing seemed to spring, Proustianly, from the hamburgers and dehydrated mashed potatoes that he’d eaten when he was growing up and maybe they were right). In short and never again: he’d become, yes, an anomaly of the system. Accepting it and recognizing it would be to complicate the flow of faster currents, more clearly defined by docks and dams and reservoirs. So, better to turn a blind eye. He was—he loved the sound, between abrupt and playful, of the tech term—a glitch. Something that also had a musical correspondence: the style of electronic music called Clicks & Cuts, constructed from samples and loops, from small pieces of sound, from cuts and clicks. His melody was difficult to whistle or to make obedient to whistles. Something that nobody knew what to do with and so, just in case, better to touch it as little as possible. A, yes, a little nameless object like the one from The Ambassadors, which he was trying not to mention. And, ah, he remembered that letter where William James (who ended up philosophizing like a novelist) recommended to his little brother Henry James (who ended up novelizing like a philosopher) that he write a book with few complications and “with great vigor and decisiveness in action” and concluded: “Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds.”

  Now, he didn’t have anything to gain. He was lost with nobody who’d bother to come looking for him. And had no interest in returning to supposedly solid ground, where he kept losing his balance, as if, all alone, he were dancing his own private earthquake. He’d been born and had grown up and had resigned himself to the fact that he’d be writing in a world where bad people always succeed and good people rarely win; but nothing had prepared him for getting slightly past a half century of life and looking out at a landscape where, in addition, mediocre people were doing so very well. There was no place in the history of literature for a career like Vladimir Nabokov’s anymore. For him, without a doubt, the ultimate, but unachievable, example to follow: an eccentric writer who became centric thanks to Lolita, a great eccentric and central book that granted him the luxury and pleasure of being more eccentric than ever in Pale Fire or Ada, or Ardor, the latter of which he was still unable to read (though it was, without a doubt, the novel he’d started the most times and, getting past the first hundred pages or so, interrupted the most times, as if struck by a singular fever), but which he respected so much. Even more here, in Switzerland, the country with the most suicides and chocolates and watches in the world (they know death and pleasure and time like nobody else) and near to the place where the most American Russian or the most Russian American had occupied a luxury hotel suite, to live out his last years and give life, as Viktor Frankenstein once did to his creature, to his last books. There hadn’t been many cases like his. Especially in the realm of literature. In music there was Pink Floyd. And Bob Dylan. And in film (it’s no coincidence that he was the one who created his own adaptation of that eccentric-central Nabokov book), Stanley Kubrick. But those cases could be counted on the fingers of one hand, the hand he used to write.

  To top it off, he’d recently learned that one of those absurd statistical reports—after inputting numbers and works and dates of death and birth into an electronic brain—had come to the conclusion that the high point of a writer’s career is reached at the age of forty-two years, three months, seven days, forty hours, thirty-five minutes, and fifty-six seconds. From that point on—he remembered that in Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver came to the conclusion that “life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments”—it was all downhill, heading toward a spoiled silence or unpleasant sound that could be accepted with the elegance of a long farewell-waltz or the violence of one of those “normal” men who gets up one day and murders his entire family. And—events do indeed precipitate—then throws himself off a cliff. What did he have left? Ten years of activity? If he gave himself the luxury of optimism and trusted in modern medicine and scientific advances to come—he had twenty “good” years left, if he was lucky, he calculated. Twenty years or four or five books to write. Provided that he was able to distract himself from the fear, which frightened him less all the time, of thinking that maybe he had nothing left to write, that it was already written, and that he’s very sorry if it wasn’t enough. Twenty years and four or five books before the generators kicked on because the lights of a slow or fast but always-catastrophic ending were starting to go out. An epilogue in which his mind would begin to forget important things and obsess over trifles. A place where the past would be greater and greater and the future briefer and briefer and the present the current that pulled you deeper and deeper, further from shore, toward a more and more deserted island in a bottle. And everything seemed to indicate that for those twenty years, suddenly revealed vistas of his most distant yesterday would come to him incessantly, demanding to be written, alongside postcards of his contemporaries receiving laurel wreaths from kings and presidents. While he—if the style of his wor
k overcame the inelegance of his life—would be left with nothing but the sanctuary of a swampy bed where he’d lie wrapped in pajamas like a wizened second skin. Every so often, some gesture of recognition, a wave from one ship deck to another in a stormy sea. Like that story that a young and talented writer dedicated to him not long ago, where he appeared named as “the living writer” (living taken to mean that his thing wasn’t dead) and built a beautiful master/apprentice fiction in which he had a wife and son. Reading the story for the second time and with greater care—paranoia now being the drug he consumed most, its potency seeming to increase with each dose he took—he wondered if the young and vital writer wasn’t, subliminally and between the lines, giving him an undesired and unrequested diagnosis, and reproaching him by insinuating that everything would’ve turned out better for him if he’d gotten married and had children. Something (a woman to whom, when that inevitable moment came for her to tell him that “We don’t have a future together,” he wouldn’t smilingly retort “But we can have a long present, right?”) that’d be waiting for him when he came home or, if he was already at home, when he managed to escape the home of the fiction inside his head. Something (a son that he imagined, always, as if in narcissistic Polaroids, where he appeared, for example, reading to him from Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, but never performing the banal tasks of changing his diapers or getting up early to take him to school) to distract him a little from the diastole/systole of reading/writing. Someone who, maybe, would inspire a story about pregnancy or paternity and even a series of essays about the first time his son experienced everything: getting on a train, listening to Bob Dylan, drinking Coca-Cola, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, going down a slide, or climbing onto a toboggan. Watching him carefully, writing down everything. To be the faithful memory of what he’d never be able to remember and to note it all down before his son, irreverent in his adolescence, would X-ray him and point out his largest and smallest defects, at a time when all he’ll want is to forget. There were books there. For sure. He could see them and even read them; but he had so little desire to write them . . . Not even enough to convince himself that a son would mean something to him. Something that, at least, like for Ulysses, would provoke the illusion of self-belief and let him fool himself that all he dreamed of was returning home. Something solid and on terra firma, forcing him to avoid drifting too far from the bays of his nonfiction and to be careful not to be pulled out to sea, to a place where he no longer felt his arms or legs and opened his mouth to let it fill with water. One foot grounded to discharge all the electricity of the lightning spinning around inside him, bouncing off the walls of his cranium, lined in layers of cork to keep out the bother of exterior noise. But, with his luck, he would’ve probably ended up marrying a madwoman like Miss Havisham (who didn’t go mad because she didn’t get married: she was always mad) or having a useless son like Telemachus (who doesn’t protect his mother, another Penelope, from her suitors and doesn’t go out looking for his father, and who, no doubt, spends his days consulting the oracle—the ancient Greek version of Facebook). Or his condemned wife and cursed descendent would end up glowing in the dark, with the pallor not of vampires but of vampire victims, slowly consumed and never allowed to attain resplendent immortality, but, merely, an agony of intermittent glimmers blown out by the wind if the windows are left open. Or succumbing to that first love, when you find it adorable and strange and oh so seductive that a girl doesn’t know how to tie the fucking laces of her shoes, so that, years later, you hate her for that exact reason, for being so imbecilic that she can’t even tie the laces of her fucking shoes. Or maybe not. Maybe the joy of a hypothetical wife and a theoretical son was worth it. They didn’t even have to be his. He could adopt them readymade: the not-so-small fourteen-year-old prodigy and the exceedingly attractive eighteen-year-old girl that nobody took home from the orphanage because they were too grownup. And maybe they’d love him and care for him and correct and comment on his manuscripts. Even the extraterrestrial earthling William S. Burroughs, after decades of wandering the world alone, atomizing the particles of his books, had dedicated, on his way out, a final entry in his journal to love as the definitive painkiller. Love as all that lasts and as the only thing that is and that remains. Love as the final solution, love as the original problem. Who knows. Too late anyway. He’d obliterated—following the instructions of Virginia Woolf before she filled her pockets with stones, following the instructions of a not-so-stable someone—“The Angel in the House.” There, Woolf was referring to the submissive and servile and domestic part that nested in the heart and mind of every woman; and that had to be excised if the woman wanted to be a writer. True, he wasn’t a woman. But he had been born with an extra rib: inside him, his biblical feminine part, intact and dangerous for his vocation. So he’d opted for being The Devil of the Desk and moving right along. And, now, hesitating, he didn’t have any strength left to dance amorous dances, perform courtship rituals, initiate signals of seduction: as far as emotions go, he was already like one of those chess masters who can anticipate the next moves and already have foreknowledge of the inexorable disappearance of increasingly valuable pieces. And so, he couldn’t help but perceive, in the very excitement of the opening moves, the agony of checkmate: nothing that begins well fails to end badly. Too late anyway. And, besides, he’d read somewhere that regular and guilt-free masturbation was one of the most practical ways to prevent prostate problems. Or, if not, maybe better, a little casual and disinterested and even paid-for sex. “A little ummagumma,” like that Pink Floyd roadie used to say in the secret language of roadies. The truth is it always disturbed him—and seemed pretty explicit—that the majority of emotional relationships ended in tears and that children came to the world crying instead of laughing. And he’d been even more disturbed attending the presentation of a writer his age—a writer who was a father, who had a son—where he’d said that, in his modest understanding “children don’t owe their parents anything and are authorized to give back only what they deem appropriate; but parents, on the other hand, owe absolutely everything to their children, down to their last breath, because they’d been the ones who’d brought them into the world.” The man seemed very certain of what he was saying. And even happy. And his little son—who, the writer said—had chosen the image for the cover of his latest book and had demanded that that image, in addition, be the protagonist, smiled happily at his father from the front row. And he didn’t feel jealous, but he did feel a certain curiosity about all of that, about the mysterious connection that seemed to unite the two of them and to make them stronger and at the same time more fragile and vulnerable to any catastrophe. Would they survive? Would they be swept away by the hurricanes of time and the diseases of shared blood? Did it make sense to take such a risk, to head out to sea, to defy the gods of fate and misfortune? Who knows. Anyway, it wasn’t his problem, it was already too late for such a possible solution. Now, all he had was what was left. Less than a glass half full. A distinction more grayish than gray that—even more sordid details to follow—he denies himself until he achieves the technicolor of his own apocalypse. Portrait of a man who writes less all the time, reading and reciting, like a Quevadoish zombie, the one that goes “Withdrawn into the peace of these deserts, / with few but learned books, / I live in conversation with the dead, / and listen with my eyes to the departed.” A despairing man, yes: a condition that those looking in from outside expect to be a kind of sweeping centrifugal force, when really it’s nothing more than the tense calm of the lidless eye of a hurricane. Despairing is the man who no longer hopes for anything. Praying more all the time to the Lord of the Crack-Ups, to Saint Francis Scott Fitzgerald of the Too Late Second Act, seeking a modicum of comfort, attempting to convince himself that he’s Fitzgerald’s disciple and equal in incomprehension and ignorance of others, reading aloud the harsh gospel of Tender Is the Night on untranslatable nights that’ll never again be soft, or tender, or sweet. Receiving, on days that stretch on
and on, punctuated by suspensive comatose siestas, the increasingly infrequent visit of a young writer. A young writer who—it won’t take him long to realize—understood nothing of his work and who will say “pop” a lot. And who will mention his name in interviews, using him like an exotic flavor (almost like a dead and failed but oh so interesting writer) when the time comes to spice up and slightly personalize the list of obvious and useful favorites. Like what happened with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, condemned by the critics at first and then, with the passing years, redeemed and even elevated to the altars as a great and sacred work and a definitive sonic portrait of the absent, of what’s not there but remains and . . . Or—the domestic wolf who never had to be domesticated, solitary and fangless, the inoffensive writer version of a terrorist more terrified than anyone, suddenly thrown into a clearing of the darkest and fiercest forest—pointing an unloaded gun at the very occasional photographer, less and less time to become the little dead man of reference and the injustice ready for posthumous redemption.