The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And then, not even that, and not even those bad books sent for his consideration (many of them by supposed “admirers,” hoping for one of those magical blurbs that’d helped launch IKEAS). And that he, inconsiderate (and if Google was good for anything: whenever some brave kid asked for a shred of his old glory in the form of praise for the band or jacket of a book, all he had to do was type his own name and that of the requester and, more than once, too many times, there was the person who called himself his disciple virtually spitting on him in virtual public), traded in for other, better books, at his habitual second-hand bookstore.

  And thus his name and address were vanishing from databases and electronic datebooks.

  And with that, they were done with him.

  And that’s all folks, adieu and, again, where was he, where had he ended up? Of one thing he was more or less certain: light years away from what his contemporaries were doing. Not in front and not behind but far off to one side.

  And ever further from the center, no doubt.

  And ever closer to something extreme. But it wasn’t anybody’s Number Zero unless you could be your own Number Zero.

  And did it make any sense to go somewhere nobody had gone and where nobody was waiting for him?

  And, right, it’s true that every so often it was convenient to shock your followers so they, after a while, realized they missed you and came back to you to love you more than ever. But, perhaps, he’d scared them too much.

  And not only had he turned their hair white, but, also, burst their hearts with the intensity of his howling.

  And others saw him and read him and compared where he was with where he’d been and, disconsolate or chuckling, didn’t think “Bill Murray.” No, what they thought was: “Nicolas Cage.”

  And what place had he occupied, in the end, in the “national tradition”? (A national tradition that was actually quite strange. A tradition whose—the only case in his language and, more than likely, in any language—canonical writers had all occupied the genre of the fantastic. And where all the great national novels were of invertebrate and tentacular and atomized structure. The short story was the reigning genre; maybe because the history of his now nonexistent country of origin had always been a succession of episodic earthquakes, where everything came to an end to start over again in increasingly brief but intensified, and more catastrophic, recurrent cycles and cyclones.) How did he confront the eternal and unsolvable problem of what one is like and how one is perceived and how does one ever manage to perceive what one is like and how one is perceived? Where did he fit on such a curved plane?

  Easy: in the attic where they lock up the lunatics.

  He was still there.

  One of the malditos—a damned, accursed writer, a poète maudit—and, oh, but he’d never felt himself a maldito. He mistrusted all of them. Among the malditos, in general, the life was always more interesting (and of higher quality) than the work. And the malditos always felt and called themselves malditos. They set a trap, yes. He, on the other hand, would rather feel himself an outsider. An outsider couldn’t declare himself an outsider. An outsider was made by others: the ones who pushed him to the edge or to the shore of the desert island, sometimes, without suspecting it, improving his art, suffusing it with the exquisite and penetrating scent of solitude. And in the case of outsiders, almost always, their work was more attractive than their lives. And, sometimes, an outsider even got to experience a moment of success (generally in the beginning of his career) that made him visible, memorable, and worthy of an occasional “What ever happened to that guy?” when it came to concocting listicles of ephemera. In the end, an outsider was someone convinced he did things just like everyone else in the world, but—he ran into fewer and fewer colleagues when he went out walking among its sand dunes—also more or less aware his world didn’t appear to be particularly well inhabited.

  An outsider was someone who, sooner or later, if there was luck or justice, found a way to return from that desert and change the world with the mirages he’d planted there to harvest later as oases. Sometimes outsiders took days to return, like Jesus Christ, in the event he actually existed. Sometimes years, like Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Bill Murray (whom he’d recognized as someone very special from the very beginning of his career, when nobody noticed him except in more or less successful comedies, and whose face, his nothing-and-everything face, a unisex and one-size-fits-all face; he’d used it over and over, like a secret mental note, to imagine the faces of the characters he’d once written, women and children and animals included). Sometimes decades, like Herman Melville. Sometimes centuries, like Cervantes. And there were strange cases, like that of William S. Burroughs, whom everyone was still waiting on and whose whereabouts were known, but, since he never showed up, successive expeditions (that never returned) had been dispatched to try to capture and apprehend him.

  Among all these rara avises, for him, The Great Outsider had always been, once again, Vladimir Nabokov.

  The universal and borderless Russian, coming and going across half the planet, and pulled out by the tides of history to later, on his own, return from exile at high sea like a triumphing king, standing atop a trumpeting pachyderm, its hoofs riding on two whales (he remembered seeing an image like that, in a medieval bestiary), shouting “Who are the outsiders now, eh?,” driving so many supposedly renowned names toward the abyss.

  He, conversely and to the contrary, had been and was and always would be, damn it, a small and minuscule and almost-invisible outsider.

  An outsider whose whereabouts were never asked after and for whom a rescue mission was never organized until scientific motives held sway over artistic ones.

  An outsider in a literary landscape where, moreover, it was easier all the time to be an outsider; because the literary establishment was smaller and less literary all the time. And there were increasingly few opportunities for an outsider to win his consolation prize: that a considerable number of insiders became interested in his outsiderness.

  It was clear this hadn’t been his case.

  His entire tradition, now, ironically, ran through being a note (not an asterisked footnote, but a numbered footnote, one of so many exasperating footnotes) at the foot of the increasingly colossal statue of his sister and a handful of minor statuettes who people always believed in more than they believed in him.

  IKEAS included.

  And another irony, even more painful than the last: before that last moment of low-intensity glory, before that strange, more or less de luxe prestige, before the publication of what would be his last book and what, more than a discovery or a rediscovery, was for him a cover up, his own funeral; IKEAS had been there for him and had his back, at each and every funicular stop.

  A funicular near his house in B (the funicular that appeared in his just-mentioned book) and (again, once more, few things make you more circularly repetitive than insomnia) one near his hotel in Montreux: the aforementioned funicular that appeared in the aforementioned Tender Is the Night by the aforementioned Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the favorite book by the favorite author of his parents (a funicular that also went up and down in Transparent Things and, transfigured and transported to Zembla, ascended from the terraces of Kronblik to the heights of the Kron glacier, in Pale Fire).

  Yes, IKEAS were part of his book and in a way had contributed to its bitter and monologuing genesis. The book had been written against but also with them.

  And now IKEAS were no longer there, or that’s how he liked to feel, that he didn’t feel them anymore. He projected himself, again, more or less forty years into the future. To a time when IKEAS’s books were no longer talked about or recognized or sold except when mentioned as a kind of temporal aberration and passing trend immediately replaced by other trends and aberrations to be surpassed. Which for him wasn’t much comfort. Because he—beyond having written that book that seemed to celebrate its own funeral rites—wouldn’t be posthumous either. (In his imagined insomniac future, he lik
ed to fantasize that his work still enjoyed a certain cult glow, buoyed more by his life than by the work itself, by the ever weaker yet sustained breath of the surprising survival and maintenance of his person.) On the other hand, the venerable mechanisms of righteous and poetic post-mortem consecration were already irreparably damaged. Everything was going way too fast for there to be time or patience to let a failure accumulate sediment and gain in seductive epic and anecdotal potency. Fifteen minutes of fame couldn’t be reformulated as fifteen minutes of defeat and, for that reason, there was no possibility of constructing a compelling story worthy of redemption and rediscovery and success. There wasn’t enough space or adequate focus for a failure to end up succeeding. Or for relationships, connections, miraculous synapses to be established that would bring the light of the masses to some obscure, unknown writer.

  There no longer existed neither the slightest distance nor that clever hypothesis of those, in their day, so-oft-cited “six degrees of separation.” Suddenly, in the first years of the new millennium—thanks and no thanks to social networks—everyone was inseparable. Everyone was together. It didn’t matter whether they were in the same place or knew each other. What mattered was the effect of planetary communion. The connection of the link. And so, all of a sudden, everyone was a genius to him or herself and, thus, the desire for singularity was lost and, even, for one’s own name, opting instead for masks and avatars and usernames and “anonymous.” And, of course, everyone knew how to read and above all how to write (because of all the arts, writing was the one you learned earliest and the one requiring nothing additional but talent), but those who could read and write were ever fewer.

  The product, then, wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was to produce or, better yet, to constantly proclaim you were producing. Everything was digital and thumb and remix and disc jockeys became more important than songwriters. Everything was made immediate and, at the same time, untouchable. The culture of the autobiographical blog (whose entries specified how long it would take you to read them) emerged naturally in the self-portrait-happy selfie culture (where people died in the most ridiculous accidents, on the edges of balconies and cliffs and there was even a flourishing serial killer who stabbed his victims in the eyes with one of those sticks for holding a mobile phone and taking close-ups of yourself with the actually interesting thing as mere backdrop).

  And—waking dream of the future—the dronicle (travel chronicles written from a drone, manufactured in Latin America if possible) became all the rage.

  And the alka-novel (novels dissolved in water that you drank and that produced the sensation of having read them without having to read them).

  And the ventrilit (where a doll sitting on your lap reads the novel of your choice in a shrill voice).

  And the lettering (reading of random letters from great classics, the A and the X were the most appreciated by critics, while, in the Spanish version, the Ñ and the H and the LL, which nobody knew exactly whether or not it was still a letter, were increasingly underground and transgressive).

  And on and on until what, for many, was the supreme and purest literary experience was attained: staring at books, without touching them, and from an ever greater distance (“Yesterday I looked at Ulysses … From ten meters! … Seriously it’s really hard to look at,” “I only look at entertaining bestsellers, I start off looking at them close up and, then, when I’m around the middle, I turn around and look at them in a photograph on the screen of my phone”) until, at last, having them disappear from sight, or erasing all trace of them on one’s mobile phone, exclaiming “oh!” and “ah!”

  And that’s how it all came to an end.

  And that’s how the end was and would be, the end that—for a few pious nights—came with the happy coda of bringing back into style, retro, the whole paper and book thing. For a few nights. A passing trend.

  And so—in his late night prophesies—what began with the certainty that everything external was for everyone and everyone was someone. Nothing had owner or authorship.

  And everyone would be happy like that, writing on their screens about what they were going to write, commenting the ones on the others, only stopping to follow their favorite TV shows (the once carefully considered singularity of the favorite that obliged a “one to ten” ranking had easily pluralized into to three or four or five digits without any need to discriminate or justify the selections; quantity over quality), which, they claimed, were better than stories and novels and, in addition, the perfect excuse: if at one time television had been accused of being the great enemy of reading, now it went even further and erected itself as the superior substitute to reading. Seeing was better than reading. And everybody happy, happily complicit. And the truth is that, in watching those shows you could, every so often, learn interesting things. Like that one—he can’t remember its name, but can remember that it was like a cross between a James Salter novel and a John Updike novel—in which someone talks about something called “secondary drowning”: the possibility that a child, rescued from the water, on death’s doorstep, could die from drowning on terra firma up to three days after the near-mortal accident that, in the end, was just that, but drawn out, like the slowest-rolling wave, a result of liquid that was never fully pumped out during CPR.

  He remembers that now.

  And he can’t forget either that he almost drowned at the mouth of a marine river, when he was a child, before knowing how to read and write; and that he believed he perceived then, in that living-to-tell-the-tale, the commencement of his literary vocation, though he already felt himself a writer in full use of his mental faculties, when he intuited that the reader reads to escape, but, first, the writer writes to go somewhere, to depart.

  The writer as an exciting/exiting being.

  And he wonders if this suffocating and insomniac night might be nothing but the secondary drowning from that first day, held in check throughout so many years, but finally catching up to him, like a wave that fills his mouth with water, sweet and salty at the same time.

  And he remembers too that, again, James Salter (a writer who always seemed to him underrated and overrated at the same time; a writer whose last novel had an editor as protagonist) had written that “The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child.”

  And the blind quotation of Salter—and the certainty that the language of personal tragedy is only spoken perfectly by one or two or three people, six at most—leads him straight to finding Penelope and being unable to find Penelope’s son; it was never known if he died in the water or in the forest, before vanishing from the borderland of a beach. And that unresolved mystery and that terrible pain that, he thought then, had ravaged his organism like a war. A pain that—making tumors bloom inside him like flowers—would bring him to death straight away, at most, in a matter of months. A pain he tried to put in writing as a form of cowardly suicide: Nabokov had said, “The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express it, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before,” and he readied himself for that. For being struck down. Being hit by a pain that was like a lightning bolt falling with a clap of thunder, but that, in reality, when it came, ended up spawning another kind of catastrophe, of the opposite sign but equally destructive: it made him invulnerable, unfeeling, beyond all illness.

  His torment—he decided and it was decided—wouldn’t be that of one killed in action before his time, but that of the eternal survivor. The bearer of an immortal agony he buffered by presenting it to second and third parties as bitterness at the state of things.

  And so, now, for him, it was no trouble at all to replace that grimace of perpetual desolation (a grimace that reminded him of the petrified features of the paternal tomb robber in Mr. Sardonicus or The Baron Sardonicus and the heartbreaking smile of Bill Murray) with a permanent rictus of disgust.

  And that rictus was ideal for wearing—as if it were a standard on his secret crusade—out and ab
out. And so, best to lower the blinds and leave that house and go back to writer fairs and writer (not book) presentations, where everyone talked about shows and screens and about the complicity among those who styled themselves “internauts,” to endow their activities with a touch of the grandeur of explorers without barely having to move, a touch of false camaraderie in that solitude. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine and, together, across whatever distance separates us, we’ll stab the back of that other person who, in general, succeeded in getting published in some “reactionary and elitist format” like that of a book.

  And there inside, across the shining surface, everything seemed so clean, so meticulous, so composed, so … book. Thus, they were all successful losers or defeated winners. On the other hand, the paper manuscript had disappeared. And so there was no longer anything to illuminate in household desk drawers or editorial filing cabinets. And who knows how many post-humifiable masterpieces were resting somewhere, in an unshakeable trance, prisoners of hard disks gone soft, impossible to decode now with technologies that had advanced beyond them.

  Maybe, to tell the truth, not too many; who knows.

  But yes, but no: he was sure he wouldn’t be considered vital beyond the grave, except as an important secondary figure, but a figure all the same, fulfilling the role of sister’s keeper: the guardian of the memory of Penelope and the Drakadia books (and he had to admit: in more than one plotline in the luminous-terrorist saga of Stella D’Or, Penelope had found a way to sound much closer to Nabokov than he ever had; and when he asked her how she’d done it, she arched an eyebrow and, with a twisted smile, answered grimly, her breath gone metallic from all the medications and her voice that of a rusted robot: “Very simple. I learned it by reading Ada, or Ardor, from beginning to end in a couple days. It’s all in there”). Penelope’s oeuvre, like a second child he—though he didn’t really enjoy it and understood its near hysterical and devotional commercial success even less—would never allow to get lost like her first.